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Douglas Lochhead's Cape Enragé is an airy, spacious, paper-thin stitching of 100 lyric fragments - sentence parts, thrown phrases, agrammatical utterances and revelations - of mostly three to five lines each. Together the haiku-like glimpses make up the kind of verse diary that Lochhead has been quietly advocating as a form in itself, indeed his own form. As he puts it in another recent collection, High Marsh Road, these are "lines from a diary," the daily pencillings-in and jottings made on a series of casual visits to the shore - Cape Enragé is on a peninsula along the Fundy shores of New Brunswick just down the road from Fundy National Park - in fact a summer of revisitings where the sand and water become a single, chanced-upon, prismatic stone looked at from all sides. Lochhead offers in the preface:

Most of the one hundred poems were written at the beach during a June, July and August. Occasionally there were other visitors but for most of the time I was alone in the strong company of the clouds, the sea, the beach and the stones.

In its own attractively diminutive New Brunswickian manner, the book deserves a place, a corner of the beach, among many of the finest shore poems in the language. It shares with Wallace Steven's "Idea of Order at Key West" a sense of the singer at the edge of things, whose song becomes a part of something that is "more even than her voice and ours, / among the meaningless plungings of water and the wind." Stevens' theatrical distances of sky and cloud, his raised theatre of weather with its ghostly actors, its tangled harmonies of human breath and ocean wind, become in Lochhead ....

I lay here all night. behind the high terrace.
in a growth of purple asters. where I usually
walk. circus of noises. the wind a bad actor.
the sea-beat of waves. a tangled symphony of
sound.

And think of the great 19th century beachcomber Walt Whitman, with his operatic tidal swells of long cadence built out of the prismatic colours of experience:

Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,
Buoy'd hither from many moods, one contradicting another,
From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,
Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil ....

"As I ebb'd With the Ocean of Life"

In answer we have Lochhead's penchant for the stray observations of the moment that are more themselves partly because they are less exemplary, less "put for" something else. Yet in their particularity there is the same Whitmanian appetite for magnitude and spacious utterance:

I have brought tea and a bag of dry apple.
last-post survivor. here I squat. by my
friend. a high winter-thrown log.
how will I answer its questions? The adventure
of it all shakes me.
******
heavy wind. heavy sea. brown turn of
waves along a grey beach. a trailing
statement of driftwood. sudden show of
wreckage to mark this sea's day. what
action all around!

But for me Cape Enragé is brought closer to home in a poem that one would like to think might have been written with something like these very shores in mind, Elizabeth Bishop's "The Sandpiper":

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
******
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
Mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

Lochhead's bird-like chirpings and whistles are calmer, if not any more focussed, than Bishop's appropriately high-strung picker-among-grains. There is the continuous, self-forgetful perfectly useless concentration (Bishop thinking of Darwin) of one sorting through the genuine particular looking for something something something:

black spider at my feet on the grey beach stones.
hunting, searching life in dry and damp places.
hiding, watching. we are all in the same climate.

There is a kind of back-and-forth - or out-and-about - quality to these poems in their daily revisitations and the always changing moods and attitudes of mindful life that might remind us of the sandpiper's hurried comings and goings, though Lochhead is quieter, more restful. And like Bishop in his focus on the particular, he fishes for the lyric equivalent of flotsam and jetsam, words and phrases just lying about, chanced upon, brought home for keeping, laid out as they were found.

If Bishop's sandpiper is a student of Blake - finding eternities in grains of sand - Lochhead has a unique way of showing us how the sandpiper in us calls Blake to mind. On page after page of these quiet shoreline notations, we feel the relationship between the particular and what the particular may become as we look to engage with it, the relationship between the fragmented and the unified, the atonal and the harmonious, the natural and the spiritual. The genius of seeing what is outside us as a part of who we are, and we a part of it, is the genius of seeing double. Blake wrote:

For double the vision my eyes do see,
And a double vision is always with me:
With my inward eye 'tis an old man grey;
With my outward eye a thistle across the way.

Northrop Frye, in writing of these lines in his book The Double Vision writes that "the conscious subject is not really perceiving until it recognizes itself as part of what it perceives. The whole world is humanized when such a perception takes place." The poems of Cape Enragé walk the line - the tide's windrow - between seeing the fragment and a spirit in the fragment, seeing the ocean debris as random and piecemeal, washed away as observed, and the quiet harmonies of seeing it that way:

every day a new worry stone. a fresh polished
and sea-tumbled headpost. tell me the whole story.
the raised beach is the high table. let it be full
dress. it is an occasion.

Think of the marriage of worlds here. Lochhead is Senior Fellow Emeritus and founding librarian at Massey College and Mount Allison Professor Emeritus in Canadian Studies. Yet there is no town-and-gown separation anxiety in his poems, much less a sea-and-gown separation anxiety (remembering Stevens' "genius of the sea ... fluttering its empty sleeves"). It is without that anxiety, then, that he goes to the beach to find a new worry stone. The magic of the "occasion" is the act of seeing doubly. He sees stones to pick up for thumb-rubbing, and headposts tumbled to the shore with their own story of toss and turn. But he sees there too, as they recede into the language like the washed-away prints of a sandpiper: the earlier years; the "worry stone" of Massey's heavy granite architecture; every day the fresh polished tables; the tumblers of water (if not sea-tumbled); the gossiping after the whole story; the full dress. The poem too dresses for its occasion, dresses to make the occasion by finding a language that holds in its catch not just a beach, but a raised beach, a high table (with its secret punnings on tides and water tables to go with the dining hierarchies at Massey), a sacrament and an occasion.

The sacrament of these secular communions reaches from the ocean discards and the weatherly disorder to the spiritual dimensions of our own desires, our mental processes, and verbal grasp:

sea, beach, valley, hills
cathedral. (Poem No. 14)
******
horizon of lights. a veritable coruscation.
like a Candlemas Day celebration of candles
for the Virgin. incredible. what is it? sun's rays
caught on a row of white clouds. like fires
candles along the far distance.

One could go as far as a Wallace Stevens in seeking out the ghostly demarcations of spirit, but Lochhead wants something more attuned to the disorder of nature, and so shares more with a contemporary like the late A.R. Ammons, who looked for a form of sacrament that would remain faithful to the fragments, the constant change, the mess and flow of being there just now. But I expect that the achievement, the real capturing of the double vision in these poems is Lochhead's own sustained lyric cacophony, not Whitman's or Ammons' oceanic runnings-on, and not a stuttering, incoherent utterance of disparate parts. Readers will enjoy the subtle schemata of musical effects in the poems, but they'll notice a thematics of music as well. Imagine objective nature in all its detail as somehow musically 'atonal': scattered on the beach, its parts related on a scale that a mathematics might compute. And imagine the mind's activity - with its penchant for connection and metaphoric relation - as an art of harmony and counterpoint equal in complexity to a Bach or Mozart. A poetry that sought to capture, soundly, the meeting of these two kinds of music, in nature and mind, might attempt a poetry of cacophony, of break and lurch and hesitation in the juxtaposition of fragments, "a tangled symphony of sound":

colder it is. a fanfaronade. yes, indeed,
a bragging sea. waves heavy with drum talk.
they seem to drag you in. to join their
parade of noises. (Poem No. 99)

A hesitant, almost a-rhythmic gathering of what would be otherwise indifferent sounds, into drum talk, a parade of noises, a boastful fanfaronade. The poem itself becomes the sea's braggadocio that pulls us in, pulls us more deeply into ourselves and into a world that we make so that we might live there. Not light or whimsical poetic harmonies, but a staccato of word and phrase, with a genuine momentum and gravity of its own to hold us in place.

What will undoubtedly move readers in these poems is partly the sense of their self-restraining music, but partly also the feeling of a modest, intimate invitation (think of Frost's "Pasture": "I sha'n't be gone long. - You come too"). The more a poet is true to his word - revealing a how in the what he sees - the more you want to share his company and look among the quartz grains at his side:

what beckons out there? the eye awakens
to this. are there banners floating
on the sea? join me for a while.