Ian Hume Obituary In Today's Globe And Mail

My grandfather, Ian Hume, pictured above in fine form, is one of Canada's sports legends.

His obituary appears today in Canada's leading newspaper, The Globe and Mail.

See below for link to online version:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060531.OBHUME31/TPStory/

I also append, below, a poem I wrote about him and his pet crow (and other aspects of his life mentioned in the obituary), published in Stand magazine; I hope the editor's of that fine UK journal will permit its reuse in this digital format on this occasion.

A Good Person In Snow

A good person, does it do them good,
to go out, late, walking in the snow?
How best, for them, to do more good
than ill? Does their goodness have

anything to do with the winter chill?
I wish to walk so, along this narrow
trail, with you and her, who are both
the same person, observed either by

myself, or a farfetched crow, such as
my grandfather took everywhere on
his seven-mile government roads,
when wood was to hand. Back to her

and you, similar friends, with a scarf
encircling your fair head. Would
goodness keep me in its rose glow, if
my dear companion of the blizzard

was dead? How to behave, at this hour
in this light? A crow with cleverness,
who belonged to a boy and never
longed for the crowd, the murder,

as they say: applying humanity to
nature in a word. This black-eyed
quickness in the past is a memory bird
shouldered by Ian as he dies, though

we prayed in December; he survived.
Is this goodness, to go on being older?
Is all love this much whiteness in wilderness?
Or like those bare trees we cut to fix a fire?

Is it wrong to hold ever tighter as you disappear?
I walk into your furnace kindly to furnish
a dream-house with an ethics based on ice;
which is to say: it is hard until it has to go.

A shift in time is enough to ease their wintry finish,
so that a blue cold dagger skates a pond, a temple
of cubes steps down a pool. No one was more fond
of her, the crow, and the winter, than that good man.

poem by Todd Swift
published in Stand; also appears in the collection Rue du Regard (DC Books, Montreal)

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

IRISH POETIC GENIUS KEVIN HIGGINS HAS DIED

Terrible sad news - the major Irish satirical poet of his generation, and a poet of comedic genius, and powerful authentic resonance, Kevin Higgins, has died yesterday in Ireland. Higgins, the author of many poetry books, most published by Galway-based Irish press Salmon, was known and admired world-wide, but nonetheless deserved even more recognition from the established great and the good - i.e. the prizes, medals, crowns, gongs and other titles thrown at many many lesser lights - except, he was so brilliantly biting, critical, and scathing of all that he spied as dishonest, unfair or wretched. Sweet-natured and hilarious in person, on paper, he was terrifyingly sharp-witted, and sparing of no prisoners. In a just world, he would be seen as the greatest of recent Irish poets, and even so, is recognised in anthologies and critical studies everywhere as the most acute, savagely clever, and startling of Irish political poets. The measure of his unexpected reach - a 'Heineken poe

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