Last Trip to Oregon, The

Poems in Wake of Red's Death

By (author) George Payerle
Categories: Poetry
Publisher: Ronsdale Press
Paperback : 9780921870968, 116 pages, February 2002

Description

In these elegiac poems, George Payerle registers the experience of life continuing after the death of his closest friend, the BC poet and historian Charles "Red" Lillard. The poems describe their last trip together to the dry landscape of Central Oregon, circle to Alberta and then turn home to the wetscape of the Shadow Weather Coast.

Throughout are woven meditations on music, particularly the Beethoven quartet Opus 131, in which the triumph of the ordinary (mundane) becomes a portal to the extraordinary (the divine). Memory becomes prayer, with the spirit of person becoming present as the spirit of place.