Robert Currie is a former Saskatchewan Poet Laureate who has written 12 books, including poetry, a novel, and several short story collections.
His latest book Shimmers of Light: New and Selected Poems will be launched on May 4 at 7 p.m. at the Moose Jaw Public Library.
Among other honours and recognitions, Currie has been a founding board member of the Saskatchewan Festival of Words, a chairman of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, a recipient of the Saskatchewan Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts, and won the Joseph Duffy Memorial Award for excellence in teaching language arts during his 30 years at Central Collegiate in Moose Jaw.
Currie said that Shimmers of Light (2022) covers about 50 years of writing. It contains selections from his previous books and four previous chatbooks. There are about 74 pages of new poetry.
MY POEMS ARE
My poems
are slim bombs
craving explosion.
their fuses lie
dark on the page
awaiting your arrival
with a light.
-Robert Currie, Shimmers of Light
“This is a book that covers so many years of writing, so there are all kinds of things in it,” Currie said. “There’s one section based on (my) book called Yarrow (1980), which is the story of a farm family in Saskatchewan in the '30s and '40s. Then there’s another section based on (my) book Klondike Fever (1992), which is a series of poems about a group of men from New York City, trying to make it up to the Klondike to get rich in the gold rush.”
Renowned poet Lorna Crozier wrote the introduction for Shimmers of Light. She called Currie a mentor for her because he “dared to turn the middle of nowhere, as those from away often perceived it, into the centre of the universe.”
Crozier wrote that Currie’s commitment to keeping his poetry set close gave her courage to write about her own smalltown home of Swift Current. She praised his ability to “rhapsodize the prairies” while not ignoring their stark, elemental nature and the harshness of prairie winters, and said that from the moment she met him she’s been “under the spell of his passionate commitment to poetry.”
In addition to the narratives of Yarrow and Klondike Fever, Currie said, “There are all kinds of poems about what I would call a common human experience, poems of youth and age and family and friendship and yearning and feeling. I’m always hoping that poems will connect with readers so that they share the experience and feel it too.”
FIRST ELEGY
Finding the chipmunk
dead in the road
its legs squashed in gummy pavement
we scraped it into a shoebox
buried it where the scrag of pine
rose like a headstone
then climbed Sioux Bridge
leaning far out
to spit on the windshield
of every passing car
-Robert Currie, Shimmers of Light
The poem “First Elegy,” Currie said, is a memory from childhood set in River Park in Moose Jaw. Finding the dead chipmunk had a strong emotional impact on him, and afterwards when they went to the bridge to spit on passing cars, “we felt like we were getting even, paying them back for doing it,” he laughs.
With few exceptions, Currie writes in free verse. He keeps his tone and language natural and familiar, free of artificiality and forced rhymes. He doesn’t shy away from the painful lows life brings, either. Death and sickness, deprivation and hard times, racism and suicide are addressed without flinching or disguise or euphemism.
“There’s a poem in the book called ‘Evening at Extendicare,’” Currie said, “which is about my father who lived the last three years of his life in a nursing home when he was in his 90s… I hope that it makes other people feel something about what it must be like to live in a nursing home or to have friends or family in a nursing home, and to feel an empathy for them.”
Robert Currie will be at the Moose Jaw Public Library, where he does much of his writing, to launch Shimmers of Light: New and Selected Poems on May 4 at 7 p.m.
