According to Robert Bringhurst’s enlightening Foreword to Heart Residence, Dennis Lee wrote his first poem at age seven and had it published at age eight. For over 50 years he has enriched our sense of citizenship, deepened our sense of fun, laid bare the many manifestations of love, and illuminated our struggles for meaning. He has written poems to sing, to skip to, cry over, ponder, wrestle with, pray with and dream by. He has tickled our funny bones and stretched our imaginations.
His much anticipated new book scoops up a selection of poems from his early Kingdom of Absence to his recent Melvis and Elvis. Heart Residence also presents intact his Civil Elegies, The Death of Harold Ladoo, Riffs, Nightwatch and Testament. While his collected children’s poetry awaits another day, this volume does include a meaty scattering of poems aimed specifically, though not exclusively, at children and does make room for Canada’s most popular poem – “Alligator Pie.”
Heart Residence is not so much a book as it is a series of books – Longing, Play, Prayer, Thought, and Joy where your hands clap, your feet tap and your body sways. A mix master, a sound master, a practitioner of polyphony, Dennis Lee is a man of many musics and many voices. Children’s voices. Teasing, playful voices. Frolicsome. Sober, serious voices. In-between voices. A little happy, a little sad. Play with me, says the young voice. Pray with me, says the old voice. And the poet Dennis Lee says, I’ll do both. Sometimes in the same poem.
Lee excites the page in various ways. Sometimes with rage, sometimes with heartache and longing. The “sizzle of/is…” is always present: how language heats up or cools down what we perceive to be real. “Day-one tremendum” reverberates in his lines. (You’ll discover that this key Leesian word is there from the start in Kingdom of Absence, present throughout the elegies and riffs, and occupies a vital space in the more recent Testament.) Tremendum has to do with the majestic, the terrible, the mysterious, the awesome, the urgent. When the lightning bolt of tremendum cleaves Lee’s lines, you respond in shivers and shakes, and a deeply grateful silence.
