Memories can often take the drifting shape of hypnogogia, that state between dreaming and awakening where odd clarities and cloudy sensations present themselves without apparent connection. In Moving Day, tender-hearted Terence Young tells his life as sunny days with cloudy periods.

"A marvel, really, all
these bits that come together
like a math equation when
it looms into sense:
I live here,
These are the people I love.";

Blending literate humour (a lonely kid quotes William of Occam in Latin to a bag lady) with day-to-day domesticity (those garden-darkening plum trees really must come down), Young is alternately wistful, funny and hyperbolic. He doesn't unfold the Big Themes of War and Peace, Gain and Loss. He's a skilled poet who can relate the universals within the world of his own street, heightened by occasional travel and his hesitant fidelities as son, friend, lover, husband, father and son again.

A breathless argument with a contractor over a collapsed sundeck, tongue-in-cheek solutions to the expense of raising children and the burden of excess friends, disposal of family heirlooms in an imagined auction; the over-arching impression is one of challenged contentment, "the dramatics over."; The contentment is tinged here and there with confusion but not with regrets.

If you have lived in the Victoria area most of your life and, in mid-life, enjoy reminiscing, then this blackberry patch is for you. 1-897109-11-3

--review by Hannah Main-Van Der Kamp

[BCBW 2007] "poetry"