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I have long thought of Fred as an older brother of whom I was very proud for his wisdom and learning and on whom I relied for his criticism delivered in a way that always left me feeling somewhat confident about what I was writing. Sometimes his comments came to me through mutual friends. For example, on one occasion it was reported to me that Fred liked the poems of mine he had read in The New Brunswick Reader. Sometimes they came directly to me as in a letter after the 2003 Alden Nowlan Literary Festival where I had presented a tribute to Robert Gibbs. "I hear," Fred wrote in a letter from Vancouver, "that you made a fine presentation."

I sensed this older brother was filled with compassion for his fellow human beings. However, I also realized this amiable man was willing to stand up for those values he believed in. One of those values was his belief in racial equality as evident in these lines from his "Ode to Fredericton," a poem published in Descent from Eden in 1959: "O snow-washed city of cold, white Christians,/So white you will not cut a black man's hair." And decades later we find his concern still burning strongly in "Eagles, September 4, 1990" where he writes: "Before we walked to the parliament buildings/To support the Indians of Oka and Kahnawaki/We clasped hands in a ring: Indians, non-status Indians,/and Whites; children, adults, and old people,/... waiting for Oldwoman's prayer/For a better future than the past had been/Or than the present is..." (ellipse: 18-19).

Though we are all sad at Fred's leaving the physical world, we are all comforted by the legacy he left us, a legacy whereby we can all keep in touch with him through the roles he performed as poet, analyst-observer, diagnostician, and kin-keeper. It is especially in his poetry that his major legacy is to be found. In it he dealt with all the major preoccupations and grievances that appear on the human stage. A close reading of the topics he dealt with in his poetry is truly astounding: sexuality, lack of confidence, anomie, environmental despoliation, stultification, mystery - all these elements - and many more - that bedevil (and inspire) individuals are to be found in his penetrating, often epigrammatic work.

As I read and re-read his poems, I do have a very real sense that he was a doctor to the world, trying to analyse what was going wrong and to suggest that there were ways to combat the pervasive illnesses. If nothing else, recognition and discussion of these ills would in the long run prove helpful. Leaving topics in the dark would not offer the possibility of healing. Wounds must be dealt with, cauterized, excised and hopefully healed. Perhaps his emphasis on poetic form and a wry humor was necessary for him to maintain control of his emotions as he dealt with so many issues that threatened to overwhelm human beings. This quatrain "It Seems Indeed a Thing Most Odd" seems to me to aptly illustrate the point :

It seems indeed a thing most odd
That every man who deems himself to be
The very image of his god
Is yet blood brother to a flea.

(A Long Apprenticeship: Collected Poems: 215)

I have often asked myself how this older brother came to be such a lover of words. And I thought of him when recently I read these remarks about language by the Bangladeshi-American novelist Bharati Mukherjee. "There is," she wrote, "a reason why the language we inherit at birth is called our mother tongue. It is our mother, forgiving, embracing, naming the world and all its emotions" ("The Way Back" in The Genius of Language: 11).

Somehow in this cradle of language in the rural milieu of Carleton County, New Brunswick, Fred came to think of himself as a poet. One who would come to recognize language as a shelter, as a kind of screen where forces, values and ideas collide. And, to borrow the terminology of the British language arts educator Jimmy Britton, as the medium through which he could be both spectator and participant in the experiences he was having.

Rereading The Stunted Strong (1954) fills me with a sense of awe at Fred's ability to see both deeply and with sympathy into the hearts of the valley folk among whom he spent his childhood. In "Sam Stover," for example, as spectator Fred takes us into the heart of a man who whittles not useful objects but "queer things you'd/Never see the like of…." And when the speaker in the poem asked what he was whittling

…'A girl,' [Sam] said.
I looked at it: 'A girl? But where is she?'
I have her here all right,' he tapped his head.
'But she won't go into the wood for me.'
'Why don't you take her picture, work from that?'
He looked at me, and then he spat.

In "The Butterfly," a poem in The Haloed Tree (1956), I have the sense that Fred is playing the role of participant when young Ben's aunt brings him a damaged common butterfly, believing he will be pleased at her gift. However, Ben sees it is "too spent to move a rubbed and tattered wing" and so he disdainfully crushes it. However, as he does so, he has a profound moment of awareness of what he is doing to his aunt, the butterfly and himself. Yet there is no undoing what he has done, for "Too late he saw a winged thing in pain/Die in the round jar of her clouded eye."

Fred also came to recognize the value of language as a medicine for his own deeply burdened soul. When he was able to deal with the death of his beloved daughter Carmen in the medium of poetry he was able to re-engage himself in the world around him once again.

For me it was a profound faith in the power of language that lay at the base of what this sensitive and perceptive brother said and wrote during his lifetime. I had not thought of it quite this way until I heard Ann-Marie MacDonald offer this idea at a September reading she gave in Fredericton. Faith, MacDonald suggested, involves discipline. And if her concept is valid, then Fred displayed his faith in language abundantly, as witness his lifelong commitment to teaching, editing, publishing, scholarly research and writing.

It was a faith he held right up until the time of his death. We have all heard of the fact that on his way to the hospital just a few days prior to his death he insisted his daughter Kathleen stop at the post office and mail manuscripts in which he was engaged.

I have referred to his vast learning and so I feel certain he was aware of the many challenges he knew he faced in choosing language, particularly in its written form, to give expression to his creative spirit and to place his voice before the world.

His medium was not paint as it has been for a Fred Ross, a Jean-Paul Riopelle or a Bobak. Nor marble and stone as it has been for Sister Marie-Hélène Allain. Rather, it was language that demanded of him appropriate images and metaphors to keep pace with a world where word meaning changes decade by decade. Two contemporary examples of this appropriateness are to be found in The Kindness of Stars (2004). In the poem "In Easy Morals...," where he writes: "In easy morals like American/A greedy company director can/With African sweat-shops, child-bought for gain,/Perform the same role as Saddam Hussein." And in "Contrast" he introduces a topic very much in the news: "Machines," he writes, "are cloned; cells/of life-variety are/individuals."

I expect that in the act of creating he would have thought of all those notes at the bottom of each page of a Shakespeare play.

And since he taught American literature he would have been well acquainted with these lines from Carl Sandburg's poem "Languages" in Chicago (1936):

Sing - and singing - remember
Your song dies and changes
And is not here tomorrow
Any more than the wind
Blowing the thousand years ago.

He would also have known about and been challenged by such observations as those of American anthropologist Edward Sapir that language is what makes us human and English philosopher Ludwig Wittengenstein that the limits of his language were the limits of his life. Surely the wide range of themes he dealt with in his poetry is witness to his attempt to face such challenges head on, to concern himself (as Georgia O'Keeffe remarked about painting her patio stones in the sky as clouds) more with the near-by than the far-away. Who knows how long the world will stand? But it is what is going on now that must concern us, motivate us, keep us moving on.

In many families there is usually one individual who knows the family history. Who knows who is descended from whom. Who maintains contact with the various branches of the family. This role has been given the name kin-keeper. I feel Fred admirably played this role through his work as a poet-translator of our francophone brothers and sisters both in the province of Quebec and Acadie. For example, in his most recently published work, The Kindness of Stars, approximately one-quarter of the poems are translations from the French.

I expect he would have agreed with the 1955 analogy of then rector of St. Joseph's University, the Rev. Clement Cormier, when he said at Mount Allison's graduation ceremonies that there are many paths to reach the top of the mountain but once the top is reached everyone sees the same moon. I can hear Fred saying, Father Cormier's metaphor has merit. And I believe it is important we know the experiences of others climbing the mountain. Hence, for example, the major work, Unfinished Dreams, on which he collaborated with Jo-Anne Elder.

And so we remember him as one who, to the very end of his life, kept his faith in language as the medium out of which he could shape works of art that would and will continue to take us into a place of challenge, beauty, paradox and, yes, even hope.

Walt Whitman chose the title "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" for the final version of his poem wherein the speaker comes to the realization that his calling is to be that of poet. Decades later out of the rocking cradle of the world came another individual in New Brunswick who accepted the same calling. We knew him, we know him as Fred Cogswell.

That he did so makes us all very grateful.