Some of Us Have Never Left
In the Dark Hours by Jeremy Le Page
In the Dark Hours, Lost Telegram Press.
Some books of poetry perform for their readers. Others keep a quieter appointment, the kind you meet alone, before light, while the world sleeps. Jeremy Le Page’s debut collection, In the Dark Hours, belongs firmly to the second kind, and I came to it the way I come to most things, in the cold and the dark. As an open-water swimmer, I spend my early mornings easing into a lake that is still holding the night, and on the very first page, I met a rider travelling through the snow on a black horse who finds that “all I see is white ahead” and “all I hear is nothing” (Le Page, in press). He was crossing a snowfield, and I was reading a lake, yet we had arrived at the same blank and beautiful hush. The book had my attention before I understood why.
Le Page is a Canadian writer and visual artist whose path to poetry ran through years of painting and the small-gallery world, and that training shows on every page. In the Dark Hours, issued by a small Canadian press that still makes its books by hand, gathers some eighty short lyrics held together by a single sustained mood, and it favours restraint over display. There is little plot to spoil. The collection centers on one situation: a speaker alone in a northern landscape, addressing a “you” who has gone and keeps returning to haunt familiar ground, and it follows the arc of that longing through the turning seasons.
His restraint and precise imagery place him in good company among Canadian poets who write landscape, solitude, and memory, Sue Sinclair and Jan Zwicky among them. Like Sinclair, he brings the natural world into sharp focus; like Zwicky, he carries a meditative, quietly searching attention. What sets him apart is the painter’s discipline he brings to the page. Each image is rooted in the body, in the plain fact of looking, so that a poem becomes less a statement than an act of seeing.
That quality of seeing is what lifts the book above mere mood. Le Page composes in clean, concrete images that often carry the economy of a print. A cardinal becomes “a drop of blood / on a thin, outstretched / branch” (Le Page, in press), three lines that hold an entire winter. Colour arrives and departs like the weather. The Return of the Sunflowers opens in a world that is “black-and-white, / like an ink sketch” until the flowers break the soil and the beloved herself turns to “noiseless colour” (Le Page, in press), only for the grey to fold back in. He sketches with nouns the way he once sketched with ink.
The music is deliberately plain, built from short lines, simple syntax, and a great deal of white space. That spareness is a structural choice, and the line breaks let silence do real work. In The Same Dreams the sleepless speaker reaches what reads like the book’s quiet thesis: when he can find the lost beloved no other way, “So I write down / these words, instead” (Le Page, in press). Poetry becomes the labour of the dark hours, the thing a person does to keep faith with someone out of reach. Recurring motifs and spiritual imagery move easily between traditions. An owl tells the speaker to “Open your eyes” and “Let yourself see” (Le Page, in press), and the figure in Shadow of an Evergreen confesses, “I am not a teacher or a holy man, / but I have an influence that is subtle” (Le Page, in press).
I felt these poems in the body, partly because endurance sport has taught me the quiet that arrives during long effort. Anyone who swims or runs far knows the moment when the outside world recedes, and the mind goes still, a state Le Page distils into a single deadpan miniature: “I meditated until / I turned into a stone/sculpture” (Le Page, in press). I race in the age-group ranks now, which is a polite way of saying I race the years, so his meditations on time landed somewhere tender. In The Trains, the speaker aches to hear the night trains again “as my youth fled from me on one of those / trains” (Le Page, in press). The book records the passing of time the way the body does, indelibly. My own life may draw me more readily to these lakes and snows, yet the poems reach past any single reader. Their spare images and quiet ache will speak to anyone who has felt longing or watched the seasons shift, whether under southern rain or city light.
The collection’s great consistency is also its signature. The recurring lexicon of snow, sun, dreams, and the absent “you” works like a refrain, holding one emotional weather long enough that a reader can live inside it. Those who love variety may dip in a few poems at a time; those who surrender to the mood will find the cumulative effect quietly hypnotic. A handful of poems widen the range and show what else Le Page can do, among them At War, where “Michael slays the dragon” and the speaker is left “at war with myself” (Le Page, in press), The Messenger, which opens “There is a war raging” (Le Page, in press), and The Restless City, pulsing with urban motion. For a reader seeking a way in, The Return of the Sunflowers, Shadow of an Evergreen, Tilt, and The Fire reward close attention.
The book matters most as a companion. It rewards the slow, dip-in reading we give a book kept by the bed, a poem or two at the edges of the day, and it offers real solace to anyone moving through grief, transition, or sleeplessness. In a hurried and noisy season, its patient attention to weather and to the more-than-human world feels almost like a corrective. For a reader who has watched recent summers scorch the interior, The Fire lands with force: years after the burn, there are “still blackened trees,” yet a new house stands and “the forest is reclaiming its lost empire” (Le Page, in press), a braiding of grief and stubborn renewal. As communities across the country face longer fire seasons and shifting weather, these poems quietly echo wider conversations about land, belonging, and recovery, tying one person’s losses to a shared concern for the places we hold in common.
The title poem gathers everything into one luminous image. Walking in the dark beside a silent stranger, the speaker sees “the light / shining through him” and “no shadow / at his feet,” and the figure tells him simply, “You must make it home / without harm” (Le Page, in press). By the last page, the book itself has become that companion, a presence that walks beside the reader through the long pre-dawn interval and points the way home. Long after I closed it, that voice stayed with me, the one that says hold your line and make the far shore. In the Dark Hours asks us to keep walking, in company, with our eyes open, and that is a quietly generous thing for a first book to do.
I write from the South Okanagan, on the unceded traditional territory of the Syilx Okanagan Peoples, whose care for this land and these waters shapes every practice of return I know. Kukwstsétsemc.
Dr. Amy Tucker is a writer and poet based in the South Okanagan. She writes 30 Days by the Sea, a research inquiry into the third shore, and “The Accidental Athlete,” a column on welcoming wellness, for the Kamloops Chronicle. She is a regular book reviewer for The British Columbia Review, and she races as an age-group athlete. Kukwstsétsemc.