Ecstatic recognitions

Sightings
by Patrick Friesen

Winnipeg: CMU Press, 2026
$24.00 / 9781987986297

Reviewed by M.A.C. Farrant

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The American poet William Carlos Williams, a titan of twentieth-century poetry, once said during a Q&A after a reading and shortly before his death in 1963, that the experience of being a poet is like “being visited by a gentle madness.”

It was Williams, alongside Ezra Pound and others, who gave the West imagist poetry (after the Chinese and Japanese), a form that returns to the classical tradition of focusing on clear images and direct presentation while avoiding sentiment and anything smelling of romanticism. Williams’ famous decree was, “no ideas but in things,” meaning that the gateway to the ineffable is to ground abstract ideas in everyday reality. 

I’m not sure if Victoria resident Patrick Friesen (Reckoning) has been as influenced by Williams as many of us were in the last century, though it’s not unlikely. After all, Friesen has been publishing poetry for fifty years—his first book, The Lands I Am, appeared in 1976—and imagism as a poetics was a formidable force during that era.

What is clear, though, is that the practice of writing poems of great profundity could be a description of Friesen’s long poetic life. His latest book, Sightings, is a kind of testament to this. Following a career that includes twenty books of poetry, five works in translation of Danish poetry, dance and music collaborations, essay writing, radio and film producing, as well as receiving multiple awards, Friesen’s literary life has been a rich one.

The masterful poems in Sightings—a golden anniversary book, if you will—range wide and deep. Friesen’s focus is both personal and transformative, with poems touching on nothing less than birth, death, and the clear-seeing moments between.

But what does it mean to truly see? Friesen seems to be asking—and answering—this question. The “sightings” he offers give us some hard-won glimpses.

The poem, “the other side of the window,” from Out of the Past, the book’s first section, is a good example of this. Friesen writes of finding himself “on the other side of the window,” the window here being a place of remove, the barrier to direct experience. He is no longer “sleepwalking” through life, the poem tells us, but has been engulfed by “an ecstatic recognition” of the simple reality that surrounds him, the place of “final wordlessness” where he can now step “into the mind of water.”  

In “attending,” which opens this section, Friesen writes of “our lonely mad species navigating through sense and thought,” of living in a chaotic world—one without “the tenderness of silence, or whispers.” In another poem, “lies and beauty,” he hears whistling, “a childish glimpse / that was before I fell into words.” It’s about the possibility of experiencing the world without human intervention, “before lies and beauty and the possible / difference between them.”

Reading the poems in Out of the Past, or rather, attending to them, I imagined Friesen holding a bouquet of balloons in celebration of the places in heart and imagination he has arrived at after years of practice, each balloon enclosing a poem with a macro view—human existence, history, the sweep of time, the brevity of our lives, our brief connections to the non-human world. This first section also includes several moving “found” poems, words erased from text to reveal gems of poignancy and insight

The second section is called Maps, and it’s as if the twenty-two prose poems presented here bring Friesen’s focus down to earth and anchors it there. He seems to be taking a breath with these poems, reorienting, saying, okay, let’s look at this particular poetic journey from another angle.

The title poem, “Sightings,” is found here. Though there can be “anguish in light,” Friesen writes, “You wait. And you wait” for the sightings, because it is through these sightings, that you “leave things behind, sorrow for one.” Sightings of the world in which you are not the centre, is what he is referring to, glimpses of the sublime, of “the presentness that burns” (as Clarice Lispector wrote). And isn’t this in part a poet’s intention? To touch this shimmering and bring it back alive?

The dreamworld can seem sharper, more placeable than the actual world in some of the poems in this section. Friesen’s concerns cover the disappearance of life, things, memories; the flow of life and perpetual change; the difficulty of capturing the ineffable in words. 

Images of mirrors, both as barriers to knowing, and the place where you might step through on the way to leaving yourself behind, weave through these poems, as do rivers—deep-sleeping, ever flowing, ever beckoning. But, in “Species Dance,” it’s “the trick of momentary forgetting” through laughter and the sense of being “abandoned to absurdity” that gives us the greatest chance of abidance in the face of our own insignificance. 

In the third section, Homages, we find poems of respect, admiration and gratitude to (and about) fellow artists who have been important to him—Joe Rosenblatt, Harry Dean Stanton, Eve Joseph, Emily Dickinson, Alan Arkin, Pina Bausch, and Anna Akhamatova, to name a few. 

Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, a writer with a profound and dark understanding of human nature, author of Darkness at Noon and The Ghost in the Machine, features in the poem “koestler’s window.” It is simply magnificent—

a telephone ringing at the end of the hall with its lonely alphabet
      waiting to come together as a sentence
and history doesn’t matter nor prophesy only the window with its
      flagrant and insufferable possibilities

By the poem’s end, Friesen, through Koestler, is telling us that even with “the wars that go on and on,” even with the terror of awakening to “righteousness and anger,” the window is always open. The “deepest sleep of rivers” will not alter this awareness, nor “all that you’ve forgotten in that current.” The window is open, and will you pass through it? 

In returning to Williams’ comment about the “gentle madness” of poets, I wondered about Friesen’s poetic journey and whether this description might apply to him. If Williams meant by the phrase an alternate rendering of our agreed upon “reality,” a gentle move away from our usual ways of seeing and being in the world, if he meant the dogged intention that allows a poet to break through this veil (mirror) and see what is before us with haiku-like precision, then, yes, perhaps this could be called a kind of madness, one that Friesen surely embodies in this work.

Books of poetry, like Sightings, aren’t something you plow through like a mystery novel and then toss aside. To the contrary, Friesen’s exceptional poems take time and close and repeated reading. We will be rewarded by doing so, having alighted on the luminous place where the world’s otherness is made manifest with words.

[Editor’s note: In BC, Patrick Friesen will appear at the following locations (along with Eve Joseph, whose Dismantling will be published in April): Munro’s Books, Victoria, April 7, 7pm and Upstart and Crow, Vancouver, May 2, 7pm.]

M.A.C. Farrant’s latest book is Seventy-Two Seasons—a memoir about noticing (Ronsdale Press, 2026). [Editor’s note: While several of her books have been reviewed in BCR, this is the author’s first review on this site. We’re happy to post her contribution.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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