Something for the Dark

Something for the Dark
by Randy Lundy
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95 ISBN 9781779400888

I’ve reviewed four of Randy Lundy’s transcendent poetry collections, and each time I’ve come away thinking surely this is as good as he gets. Then a new title’s released … and the ceiling rises again.

Something for the Dark, Lundy’s latest, follows Field Notes for the Self (2020) and Blackbird Song (2018) in a trilogy of meditative books that address the whole of it: life and meaning; connections with people and place (he’s often “on the back deck” with cigarettes and coffee, and his poems surreptitiously venerate the prairies he long resided on); seasons; his beloved creatures (particularly dogs and birds); nothingness and silence; and writing poetry (“These lines are getting the/discussion nowhere”).

I built a fire in the woodstove, lifted the old dog up onto the couch, and, in silence and solitude, let the words nourish me. Lundy possesses the artist’s gift of seeing, certainly, but he also exhibits the rare ability to render images and experiences into something other, something that borders on the holy—a crow feasting on the rib of a “road-killed deer” holds “a strip of meat/in its beak, a red prayer flag hanging limp in the February wind.” Poem after poem, we find a singular “kind of knowing” and acceptance, ie: “There will be dark and cold; it will go on for/days and months.”

There are at least a dozen uses of “nothing,” including “Nothing is hidden here;” “Nothing remains/to say;” and a “silent, brooding” father:

sitting at a kitchen table in a
fourteen-foot-wide trailer, one hand holding a cup of coffee
in front of him and a cigarette hanging forgotten in the other,
staring out the single-pane window and seeing nothing but
his past

Lundy’s father “died early and alone at the back/of the trailer [the poet] grew up in.” All these nothings contain much, including a grandfather who “taught me/to make of silence something rather than nothing,/something from nothing.”

I believe we all need poets to tell us what we didn’t know we were yearning to hear: that “A broken, long-/abandoned wasps’ nest [hangs] like the body/of a headless owl. And, for those who write and those who don’t, that “our job is to stand at a distance,/avert our gaze,/and wait.”

Lundy slices away the noise and gently, even reverently , delivers us to emotional ground zeros, ie: a man who has just chainsawed his rotting apple tree is weeping, in part because “ rotted-into-emptiness” rings personal. The tears make him feel

embarrassed, even
slightly ashamed, though there was no witness except the two
dogs, one on either side, muzzles raised in concern, taking turns
rubbing and then leaning their weights against [his] legs.

Consider “the dog’s/ears that hang like a pair of temple bells.” The red meat of Lundy’s prayer flag. This writing feels like a new religion, but it’s the oldest of all—the one in which “rocks breathe,” and “your spirit has nothing to do with/heaven or eternity./Just these things, here and now, that you can touch and see.” Preach, Poet.

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