When George Loset’s curiosity catches hold of something, he turns his craftsman’s attention to it: an eye for both detail and form. The Driftwood Foundation used his slides to make its Tribute to the Babines. When his wife, Diane, took up weaving, he carved her many of the eccentric tools of the trade. When he needed a new canoe, he made one of cedar strips. He started writing poetry about 10 years ago, poetry that explores an intimate connection between the land he has lived on near Smithers for twenty-seven years and the world of spirit and emotion.

November morning walking
Some mornings the back door closing
will shut in the mayhem of World Report.
Down the hill feet blinded by the yard light
look for edges.
The skin with its loose collection
of bones and holes lurches on, reaching
toward the lean austerity of trees in winter.
The dogs range out quartering the long vowels of the wind.
Two wraiths floating: lighter than moon shadow,
blacker than midnight remembered.
Coming back in the half light
dawn is piecing together the east horizon.
Muted, the fences barely contain the road’s meander.
Deflected it rises to the left; turning as if
pain could be shut in one room, as if
honesty could be written down, turning as if
grief were a coat we wore for one season.

"When we walk through the world, my sense is that there’s much more going on than we’re able to imagine," he tried to explain.
"There are stories out there and some of them we’ll hear and some we won’t. Writing is almost always some kind of translation."
Like the Haida poets he admires, George tries to combine the language of mythmakers with an acute sense of the physical world.

Beloved,
between morning and mountain
swans!
not just swans
but swans utterly free
swans, all curves and distances
a great stillness in motion
each one a swan
the colour of winter
remembering snow in sacred places
they slant away
north by northwest
leaving nothing between
longing and its many names
the perfect wedding guests
witnessing our vows
in the book of silences

While George has spent his working life fixing cars, farm equipment, and now selling car parts at NAPA in Smithers, he spends most of his free time outside — hunting and fishing as a child, mountaineering as a young man, ski-touring, hiking, canoeing, and kayaking with his growing family. "I was taken outside before I could walk. I’ve never known anything else, though I’ve lived the city."

Curiousity about how to reconcile his love of solitude and the natural world with the western culture in which he grew up sent George in search of other writers with a similar focus: Mary Oliver, Don McKay, Robert Bringhurst, Bill Reid.

"I’ve always read — there were books in the house and we had access to anything we wanted."

He also sought out writers like Barry Lopez and Peter Mathiesson, who write about their spiritual experiences in some of the wilder places of the earth. He captures the impact of this wild world in this excerpt from Birds at the Boundary:

For years I have watched cranes in
ragged lines draw October down.
My dreams are filled with wing beats.
Off the Beaufort shore, out of nameless
Yukon river flats I have seen them south.
It was enough.

Birds aren’t the only fliers that have fascinated him.

Entre Nous
If I give up coffee, or sex
or turn off the news
or
if I watch this old Buddha moon
her roundness shouldering
through the spruce tops
to comfort blind Orion
who remembers the day
Hektor’s dreams turned to ash
or
if I watch for owls
all hooks and knives
trolling for sushi
will
the riffs and improvs
of ravens predict
the hawks of May
the cranes of October
just so, just there
or
the midwinter falcon
ex tempore
who cuts and hangs
a Sunday afternoon
in the vault of the skull
while
Icarus in his little room
below the grass ponders
his flight manual and wonders
what if
what if he’d listened
what if he’d watched the breath
the breath of the other
the other in translation
translating him.

He also loves to play with the sound of words. Spurred on by Al Purdy’s "Say the Names," George tried his hand arranging the music of BC place names in "Songs Your Mother Sang."
He went one step further than Purdy, though, by linking vivid and precise geographic and cultural images to the places he names — as this excerpt illustrates:

Sing it, this is not the burden of some other
Skeena Sidina
hemlock and cedar
rivers remembering high water low water
the impossible light the improbable green
Wapiti Wapiti
Kechika Nechako
Gitanyow!
Sing them, the songs that came
down the sheer edge of morning
and ended in orchids
sing your part in the round
your part in the breathing
Olalla Oyama
horsetail and heather
Gitanyow!
Sing it now, celebrate the stone
in your shoe, the long shots and snake eyes
young men and horses, backs turned
taunting the knives of December
Nicola Nicola
jackpine red willow
Quilchena Pennask
Gitanyow!

As he’s done with most of the other crafts he has explored, George largely taught himself to write by reading, listening, and practicing.

"Language is like any well-made tool — if used appropriately you can make something with it."

In his hands, language tracks meaning along an elusive game trail, tracing our connections with the unseen and elusive voices out there.

(Sheila Peters is an instructor at NWCC in Smithers, a writer, and co-owner of Creekstone Press.)