Habent sua fata libelli – books have their own destinies, and this book arose from the City of Edmonton’s commission for the Louise McKinney Riverfront Park in downtown Edmonton. As a part of the park’s design, the poems in this book are engraved on stainless steel plaques attached to lamp posts that light the promenade along the riverfront. The park is not the book, so you may wish to walk through the park and walk through these poems.

The poems were written originally in lucid English and French with occasional Cree, Michif, Chinese, and Ukrainian translations that speak to the unique multicultural ambience cultivated in Edmonton. Just as they do in the park, the poems in these languages come into view first as a way of showing respect to these cultures in the making of the city. The setting in most of the poems includes sharp Canadian imagery: “coyotes,” “frozen fountains,” “glaciers,” and “poplars.” Blodgett has most masterfully interwoven these essentially Canadian landscape images with the resilience and the pioneer spirit that define Canadians through the use of delicate tropes and figurative devices as when, for instance, he personifies Edmonton’s “trees” which to him appear to “possess” “humility” and “braveness” “beneath the ice and wind and snow.”

The lyrics are dense with powerful images and thoughtful metaphors that create memorable links between Canadian nature (even within city limits) and the sublime, which in Blodgett’s poetry is used interchangeably with “silence” as heard outdoors mostly during wintertime. Blodgett incorporates “silence” and its everlasting and weighty presence on earth quite frequently in all his lyrics. The poet traces the origin of his preoccupation with silence to his interest in sacred texts and the fact that God in these texts has revealed to us that mankind was created from “nothing.” “Nothing,” according to Blodgett, is nothing but “silence.” And God is silence, and all activities on earth are the outcome of the mysterious relationship and the interaction that exist between silences, Blodgett believes. The secondary silence that encompasses all nature and creatures, both animate and seemingly inanimate, originates from the primary silence that is the divine. All creatures carry within themselves this silence, but the more silent a creature is, the closer it is to the source. Based on this philosophical principle of Blodgett’s ideology, stones and pebbles, which are lowest in the great chain of being, are closer to the sublime than any other creature because of their overwhelming silence.

Despite the deceptive simplicity of language and form in Poems for a Small Park, the lyrics almost always speak through metaphysically subtle ideas. In Douglas Barbour’s words, the small lyrics, “in a sequence meant to be read as a whole . . . evoke place as possessing transcendental possibilities for the carefully perceiving eye.” These lyrics are most certainly not silent themselves; they open small windows to the small park in downtown Edmonton and to silence itself.

Blodgett also believes that nature and natural elements are in a constant state of flux. The poet is of the opinion that the transience in nature can be easily perceived if one watches closely and with perceptive eyes. Change is the only stable and permanent ingredient in nature, and like silence, it encompasses all beings and all nature. Interestingly, Blodgett’s lyrics speak to change by delicately and unconsciously forcing us to see natural phenomena around us in a different light each time we read his poems. By referring to the most ordinary phenomena in nature through poetry, Blodgett “washes the dust of custom from our eyes” as the Iranian contemporary poet, Sohrab Sepehri advises us to do regularly, and by so doing defamiliarizes them and refamiliarizes us with our environment and ourselves. As Sepehri says: “eyes should be washed; a different vision should be sought / words should be washed / words should be the wind itself; words should be the rain itself” – in an ongoing state of flux and passage, and only then we can truly “see” and this is precisely what these lyrics do: introducing us to the earth, to one another, and above all, to ourselves.

The philosophical nature of these poems does not make them inaccessible, however. These lovely short lyrics are written to be read by anyone. According to George Amabile, they “revive an awareness of our origins, our intimate confluence with the processes of earth, air, water, fire, stars, moon and cosmos. They remind us that this sense of other in ourselves reaches like light, or music, in all directions, back beyond history, and forward toward a hopeful but uncertain future.” With their exquisite eloquence, these lyrics strike chords in us in response to nature and its elements. Graceful, and dressed in beautiful yet unpretentious apparel, Blodgett’s sincere words appeal to us all and bring out our humanity in a most magical way.

– Manijeh Mannani, Edmonton, 2008