The Life We’ve Spilled

When the Canadian poet and playwright Richard Sanger died of pancreatic cancer on 12 September 2022, aged sixty-two, he had completed work on his fourth collection. The cancer had been diagnosed and treated in the two years preceding his death and the poems in Way to Go consider the uncertainty of illness and inevitability. That they do so with joy and lightness is a sign of the book’s quality. ‘Flâneur’ tours the independent bars and restaurants of downtown Toronto and closes, ‘I drank in all of you – I drink you all in, / your suds, your solace; I haven’t had enough’. The unfairness of it all doesn’t register – this is not a poetry of complaint but one of praise – and Sanger bustles through the poems, eyeing the streets around him.

A student of European languages, Sanger shows his cosmopolitan sympathies throughout the collection, offering a wistful translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Recueillement’ and a chatty response to the Brazilian poet and composer Antonio Cicero’s ‘Palavras aladas’. But his poems depend on the immediate world – slices of life in Toronto embedded in community, family, love, relationships. The book opens with ‘Into the Park’, the speaker on his bike, riding into surroundings he knows but is equally surprised by: the ‘entanglements’ and ‘dangers’ of everyday life around him. In ‘Valentine’, what begins with an observation about ‘our punk Juliet from down the street’ hanging her washing becomes a reminiscence. The poet reimagines his own youthful love and long-term affection, ‘… the ...