Literary / Arts
A Life Celebration for Allan Brown (1939 – 2016)
Susan McCaslin
Volume 32 Issue 4, 5 & 6 | Posted: June 11, 2018
A Life celebration for Allan Brown (1939-2016) was held at the Martin Batchelor Gallery, Victoria, BC on May 12, 2018, organized by Pat Jamieson, Richard Olafson and Sheila Munro.
Allan Brown: Opening Silences
Eulogy by Susan McCaslin
We have come together on this beautiful spring day to celebrate the life and legacy and of Allan Brown, a superb Canadian poet, born here in Victoria in 1934. In his later years, after retiring from teaching at what was formerly Malaspina College, Allan deservedly came to be known as “The Bard of Powell River,” a remote community on the upper Sunshine Coast of BC.
A Life celebration for Allan Brown (1939-2016) was held at the Martin Batchelor Gallery, Victoria, BC on May 12, 2018, organized by Pat Jamieson, Richard Olafson and Sheila Munro.
Allan Brown: Opening Silences
Eulogy by Susan McCaslin
We have come together on this beautiful spring day to celebrate the life and legacy and of Allan Brown, a superb Canadian poet, born here in Victoria in 1934. In his later years, after retiring from teaching at what was formerly Malaspina College, Allan deservedly came to be known as “The Bard of Powell River,” a remote community on the upper Sunshine Coast of BC.
I had the pleasure of meeting Allan in 1998 after he had generously reviewed my poetry in The Malahat Review. On one of his regular trips to Vancouver, he contacted me to suggest we meet in person for coffee on South Granville near where he was staying with a friend. Continuing these wide-ranging and meaningful conversations almost every time he came down became a tradition I seldom missed, even though I lived east of Vancouver in Port Moody and Fort Langley.
Allan continued to review my work over the years, and I wrote an endorsement for one of his twenty-five books of poetry, but after our first encounter we became fast friends. He was both erudite and humble, knowing Latin, the classics, the Romantics, European literature, Asian traditions (the haiku), modernism, and more. We shared a love of the mystics, the Psalms, contemporary transformations of biblical and classical mythologies. We talked about our love of William Blake and Thomas Merton. I found his poetry luminous, witty, contemplative, authentic. I also experienced Allan himself as a “gentle-man,” kind, compassionate, a good listener.
All these qualities and more were embodied in his poetry, where he explored our human frailties, but also our potential to be more than our fragmented selves. He had a gift for summoning words from the depths of silence where, as the poet Keats once said in a letter, they emerged “as naturally as the leaves from a tree.” This is not to say that the process of writing was always easeful for Allan, since he was an impeccable craftsman, but that he sensed his poetry was somehow grounded in an interiority that transcended his everyday self.
When reflecting on what to say about Allan and his many accomplishments, the word “silence” emerged. Perhaps he chose the phrase “frames of silence” for the title of one of his many volumes (Seraphim Editions, 2005) because he found himself sometimes able to enter a musical silence that is the twin of words. I see his poems as a dialogue between the depths of silence and the flow of language. Because of this transformative quality, I believe his poems will endure.
Readings:
An excerpt from Allan’s long poem “The Almond Tree” in Frames of Silence (Seraphim Editions, 2005). Suggested by Allan Briesmaster, one of Allan’s editors and a good friend.
An elegy for Allan’s wife Pat (1932-2011), “Bicycle in the Shed” in Before the Dark (Leaf Press, 2014).
Allan’s books are available from ICN.
Susan McCaslin