Are there any two words in the English language more beautiful than “cannibal rats”? Possibly, but Richard Greene gives them a run for their money. The titular rats are living on a ship off the coast of Ireland when they are discovered by a local newspaper, after which they “joined all that history of drowned fleets / without song or poem but a million tweets.” For a poem about rodents that eat each other, it has a real sense of grace, and humour so subtle you might blink and miss it. 

Throughout the collection, Greene, a St. John’s native now living in Toronto, observes various scenes of wreckage, always remaining at a slight remove (“Off Lampedusa this week,” he writes, “two boats capsized, / sixty saved, twenty-seven lost.”). His journeys take him from Sicily to Gettysburg to Toronto, although they are always shot through with Newfoundland (no one ever leaves Newfoundland for Ontario without hearing something about it). He fends off uncritical nostalgia:

Revenant myself, I may not cavil

about how art and memory unravel,

followed my chances on the mainland,

got tenure, found the taxpayers’ open hand,

and am now a Jonah where I was born

confused by both the fog and the foghorn;

returning to my peculiar Nineveh,

I have no message: I’ve just been away.

These poems are not anxious about what they need to say, and because of that Greene is able to invest in the big picture, nurturing a single sentence over several lines. That also means the one-liners really pop: “I watch the weather losing heart.” Other rhymes wink: “eighty-nine / morphine,” “desperate / New York State.”

At another point, teaching his students, Greene observes, “They knew nothing then of Bogey or Ingrid, / of having Paris or ‘looking at you kid.’” If the sum total of Casablanca’s clichés actually made it a perfect movie, harkening it to a golden age of cinema, so too do Greene’s poetic conceits – couplets of eleven syllables, shipwrecks, journeys home – harken his work to a golden age of poetry. Only a few times does he reveal he is not so sure about ability to recall these things with one hundred per cent accuracy: “You were, I think, prisoner of memory,” “this vividness unexplained.”mRb