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Philosophy, according to the German poet Novalis, is really homesickness; it is the urge to be at home everywhere. What does it mean to think about home? Where is home? Is it a house of language? Is it a root cellar buried in the slope of a sand hill? Home, like rhythm, like metaphor, like myth, like wisdom, is one of a number of openings into the contrapuntal exploration of poetry and philosophy that is Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy. This is an exceptional book. It is in some measure a continuation of conversations collected in Tim Lilburn's earlier book Poetry and Knowing (Quarry, 1995). With this collection, however, the number of contributors has been paired down. Featured are those from the previous book most intimately engaged with contexts and issues surrounding the Western philosophical tradition's often vexed relationship with poetry and poetics. These five writers, Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky, are among the finest poets writing in Canada today. This collection is a wonderful invitation into the "forms of life," as Zwicky might say, of the physical, metaphysical, or, as Brian Bartlett distinguishes in his excellent introduction, ethical concerns of these poets. Poetry and philosophy are explored here as sympathetic if not interdependent activities; one does not oppose the other, rather, like Trevor Goward's metaphor for lichen in Don McKay's essay (lichen is "fungi that have discovered agriculture"), both poetry and philosophy belong to each other.

While individually inflected, similar concepts keep coming up as communal points of inquiry in these essays. I'm thinking, for example, about "coherence," "nature," "humility," to name just a few. In the opening essay Dennis Lee asks: "What makes a poem cohere? How does it mean what it means?" Questions such as these unfold into other questions; a discussion of coherence depends on a discussion of rhythm, which depends, among other things, on a discussion of the history of meter in English poetics. Lee's interest in rhythm is structurally reflected in the formal composition of the essay. He proceeds by way of short numbered sections which often move like lyrics, by association and analogy rather than by rigid syllogistic steps. There are moments of analytic scaffolding but these are balanced with lyricism, enacting the tension he discusses in poetry between the rigidity of the metrical foot and the creative life of transgression. Lee writes of a poem that "Each rhythm shapes the energy flow with a distinct logic; each parses the world with a syntax of its own. A poem thinks by the way it moves." But this raises conceptual questions for him: "How can you translate its native terms into categories your mind can deal with? How do you talk about moves your body grasps in a flash?" The interrogative mode dominates much of the writing. This complements the fundamentally gestural procedure of the essay in the face of conceptual limitations.

Don McKay's essay, "The Bushtits' Nest," picks up on some of these questions of linguistic limitation and gestural expression; for him it is the face that expresses, that serves as "an address to the other with an acknowledgement of our human-centredness built in, a salutary and humbling reminder." McKay turns to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas in this essay in order to consider how poetry, as a humbling gesture to the other, potentially participates in an environmental ethics. He equates Levinas's "other" with his own notion of "wilderness," which he conceives of as "the placeless place beyond the mind's appropriations." A face expresses without language. In this way, he reasons, the gift of it, in the practice of art, in anthropomorphic metaphor, is not so much possession as it is homage; it is an acknowledgement of the impossibility of avoiding an anthropocentric take on the world. Metaphor itself, as a wild figuration within language, is an appropriate conduit for this gift. Some of the poetic and philosophical themes McKay previously explored in his essay "Baler Twine" in Poetry and Knowing are cultivated and expanded in this essay. McKay's writing is eminently pleasurable to read; from his short parable about Adam's nomenclatural struggle in the garden to his anecdote about bushtits building a nest in the driveway, his prose is engaging and delightful. Indeed, my only complaint with this book is that there are not multiple and newer pieces from both Lee and McKay. Both essays included here have been previously collected elsewhere (Lee: Body Music, 1998; McKay: Vis ŕ Vis, 2001). Nonetheless, both are engaged with similar queries and conundrums preoccupying the other writers.

Robert Bringhurst's contributions to Thinking and Singing are compelling engagements with disciplinary boundaries and with the natural origin and cultural role of myth. In "The Philosophy of Poetry and the Trashing of Doctor Empedokles" Bringhurst argues that we should not see Empedokles as simply a Presocratic cosmologist but also as a practitioner of innovative poetry. Indeed, Bringhurst takes issue with Aristotle's categorization of Empedokles as "a versifier rather than a poet." Of what use, he asks in the essay, is the term "philosophical poetry?" T.S. Eliot's unhelpful insistence that philosophy and poetry remain separate enterprises, with the former confined to the realm of abstraction and the latter to the realm of feeling, have done much to institutionalize a kind of limited taxonomic thinking. As Bringhurst notes:

"The moment we leave the conceptual jail where philosophy and poetry are confined to separate cells, we find ourselves in plenty of good company as well as fresher air. We are free to walk with Lao Zi and with Zhuang Zi, Empedokles, Parmenides…with Nietzsche and with Wittgenstein, Erigena and Pascal - and with many Native American thinkers who may never use any of these terms but in whose practice it is clear that myth is the essential mode of poetry, the essential mode of philosophy, and the link between the two. (The Haida poet Skaay is one especially fine example.)"

The issue of myth, raised here as a potential articulation between poetry and philosophy, is explored again in his second essay "Poetry and Thinking." A myth, for Bringhurst, "is a particular kind of story: a story that thinks about the world and so becomes, in some inherent sense, poetic." He develops his notion of myth through an interesting discussion of culture. Like literature, like pattern, culture is not manmade; the earth, as the ultimate crucible for our education, as original imperative, is the foundation of human culture, black bear culture, bushtit culture, etc: "The culture of nature is the culture all these other cultures are a part of, the culture of the whole which none of the parts can do without." He adds: "The library was here before we were. We live in it." Stories and poetry, therefore, exist around us, as elemental constituents of our earthly culture. Poetry is not the exclusive domain of language, Bringhurst stresses; rather, language is produced in poetry and "stories are the fruit that language bears." "You and I," he suggests memorably, "are stories told in ribonucleic acid."

There are examples, of course, of myths and stories that think about the world in reductive and highly destructive ways. Bringhurst emphasizes that "Myths are theses, not beliefs." He draws a distinction between what he calls "real" myths and "social" myths. Real myths, like culture, are not manmade. Social myths, on the contrary, are closed systems that totalize belief. As Bringhurst points out, "The myth of racial superiority doesn't shine like a flowering apple tree or a star. It isn't poetic."

The implications of closed and open systems to philosophical inquiries are also explored in Jan Zwicky's contributions to Thinking and Singing. What does it mean for dreams and jokes to be understandable and yet not reducible to the systematized logic of analytic thinking? What is at stake in thinking about a world not circumscribed by language? These are the kinds of questions that emphasize the proximity of poetry and philosophy. In "Dream Logic and the Politics of Interpretation" Zwicky argues that primary process (dreams, the getting-of-jokes, etc.), as a legitimate form of thinking, does not require interpretation as such; rather, it is for political reasons that the apparatus of analysis is used to generate translations. She suggests that the political requirement for this barrier of interpretation, while perhaps being "necessary for civilization as we know it, is not necessary for civilization." The essay deals in part with the troubled binary between unconscious and conscious thought, between primary and secondary process. If the Freudian "talking cure" aims to translate primary process to consciousness, to logical intelligibility, then, Zwicky suggests, it becomes subject to problems similarly associated with poetic translation and the alleged impossibility of faithfully or accurately moving between languages. In refusing the apparent vagaries of primary process, in imposing translations on perfectly meaningful thought, philosophy boxes itself into the practice of "rigorously mechanical analyses." "What philosophy loses," she argues, "if it refuses the logos of dreams, is above all, the intelligibility of itself as an erotic stance toward wisdom." Wisdom, for her, is an awareness of these limits of closed, schematic translations.

Zwicky's second essay is a humorously written monologue from the perspective of a cowboy in an Old Western saloon. This piece is an interesting complement to others in the book in that, unlike Bringhurst's discussion, for example, which traces some of the historical rejections of poetry by philosophers, here Zwicky is questioning the fervent celebration of poetry by an influential philosopher, "Marty Heidegger." The cowboy narrator is suspicious of what it means to think of poets the way Heidegger does. To think of language as the constitution of Being and to think of poets as the masters of language potentially eliminates humility from poetic acts of attention. Does the world exist outside of language? The cowboy cautions: "If you think it's obvious the world is out there, turns out you have to give up on bein able to provide a proof fer how you know that." Ultimately, we all have to decide what to believe in; whether it is to follow Heidegger's mythic ethos or acknowledge that there is a world outside of logic, outside of language. This choice, Zwicky reminds us, is fundamentally ethical.

Tim Lilburn writes in his newest book of poems, Kill-site (2003), that "First philosophy is mystical theology." It is this, before ethics, before ontology, that furnishes thought with the erotic attention most suitable to un-hubristic home-making. By considering what he calls foundational works of Western erotics, Plato's Phaedrus, and Homer's Odyssey, Lilburn contemplates in Thinking and Singing how best to think about home, about place - which ultimately is for him a poetic activity. Landscapes, he argues, "have long, exacting apprenticeships." While he acknowledges that it makes sense to listen to what Native traditions have to say about making a home, Lilburn maintains that "we shouldn't go further now than just a little listening; a person can't simply inhabit the fine ear of another culture through mere intention." Something in the past, in the Western cultural tradition, must offer a route back to residency. For this he looks to an "apokatastatic remembering": a kind of home-making that is an anti-systematic, erotic enterprise represented in the dialogues about desire between Socrates and Phaedrus as well as in Odysseus's longing for home. In his essay "Going Home" Lilburn suggests that it is in those moments when one is disarmed by beauty or a moral gesture that desire enacts a nostalgic memory even if there has been no historical correlate: "you will realize you have always known it was without parallel even if it had not always been present in memory." This is a very interesting recuperation of the idea of nostalgia, a term that has suffered (not undeservedly so) from association with the kind of closed, social myth-making that Bringhurst discussed. Nostalgia here, on the other hand, is associated with openness, with an erotic consciousness of distance, of the far-ness of things, their ungraspable-ness.

What both of Lilburn's essays emphasize is the importance of listening with humility to the details and rhythms of place: "Read shit, read the dear trails. Practice an activism of forgetting the royalty of one's name, of yielding, of stepping aside." For him neither ethics, nor ontology can bring one home without "ossifying effects." I would suggest, however, that Lilburn's characterization of ethics, as one in which the "good" is systematized, does not fully take into account other ways of looking at ethics (Levinas, for example) where love for the other is not ontologically centred. Nonetheless, Lilburn argues persuasively that "eros pulls you home" in the "gravitational field" of a world that is imperatively interesting, beautiful, and fragile. Indeed, all of the writers in this collection in one way or another, implicitly, or explicitly, return to the spectre of environmental degradation. How to be at home in the world involves remembering and respecting the fact that we didn't invent the world. We have invented ways to look at it, we have invented civilizations, systems of thinking, but, as Bringhurst points out, "we didn't create it, and if we destroy it, we cannot replace it." The breadth of this book is remarkable; we move from the Presocratics and the Phaedrus all the way up through the Old West to surrealism and to the contemporary lives of birds' nests. These works are thought-provoking investigations into how poetry and philosophy, as sympathetic impulses, as generative modes of thinking, might offer alternative ways of conceiving of one's relation to the world, to home, to how it is we love.