In Conversation: Elana Wolff with James Deahl

Elana Wolff discuss James Deahl's latest release, Four-Square Poems

James Deahl was born and raised in Pittsburgh, and in the highlands of West Virginia. He immigrated to Canada in 1970 and has lived most of his adult life in cities in Southern Ontario—Toronto, London, Hamilton, and now Sarnia. Deahl has worked as a publisher, editor, lecturer, critic, and screen and audiotape writer; for the past eighteen years he has focused full-time on writing, editing, and translating. He is the author of over thirty books and fifteen chapbooks (mostly poetry). This conversation centers on Deahl’s new collection, Four-Square Poems (Aeolus House, 2025).

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Elana Wolff: Before I opened your book I was intrigued by the title, James. “Four-Square” has an historical ring to it. It evoked for me an architectural quality—of things well-built, solid and enduring; poems that are timeless, candid, bold, possibly plainspoken. In your introduction you indicate that the collection “gathers together four extended poems … published in book form to mark forty years since the publication of your first full poetry collection.” So there is an historical aspect to the book and ‘fourness’, of course, is central to it. Did the title come to you first and lead the shaping of the collection, or vice versa? Can you elaborate on the significance of four, and on how ‘four-squareness’ relates to the qualities of the poems.

James Deahl: All four poems that comprise my new book had been published in quite limited editions, with the first one appearing in December of 1982. Very few readers would have ever seen any of them, so I thought a proper book would be the best way to get them into the public domain, into academic and public libraries. I have always liked the number four: a very firm number. The book seemed to me to be an appropriate way to mark forty years since my initial trade publication. Forty is ten times four; and two times forty is eighty, an age I’ll reach later this year. It has been a long—and happy—journey since I wrote my first poem in 1964.

Elana Wolff: Happy Birthday in advance! Yes, number four does have firmness to it. The symbol for Earth is a circle divided into four quarters—representing the four cardinal points: north, south, east, and west. There are four seasons, four winds. Earth/landscape, the seasons, the winds—all have resonance in your collection. The poems combine a strong sense for place with depth of feeling, belief, also spiritual quest and contemplation in and through nature: “Hamilton”: “What prayer would help / lessen the grief time brings?”; “Hiorra”: “If wisdom accumulates / there is no evidence / and yet / trees do speak,”; “Dolly Sods”: “Beyond the woods, on the winter heath, the time of year / is a time of reckoning, a time for honesty / below a sky so pale it seems to reach eternity.”; “Petawawa Gorges”: “This shield has endured a million years. / Is this Canada? The real Canada / conceived long before we were thought of?” The seasons are also well represented—“April’s rain,” “late October,” “the long year’s turning,” “the sky at Solstice,” for example. There’s “The West Wind” too: “… of course, there must be wind. /As with other penitential pilgrimages, / we discover love transfigured, / clarified, enkindled anew.” Beautiful. My sense is that “The West Wind” is as much a paean to your late wife—poet, novelist, and teacher, Norma West Linder—as it is about the land (the “promontory into Lake Cauchon”) and the shifting winds. “In the Lost Horn’s Call,” the first long poem in the collection, there’s also a mysterious reference to “Death’s body divided by four.”

James Deahl: It has long been my thought that, although we flawed humans have become estranged from our Creator, we can discover hints of Grace in the natural world. This is a view I have in common with the Welsh writer Arthur Machen. Machen was a staunch member of the Church of England; he was a bit of an Anglican mystic, one could say, or even a Christian Kabbalist. Here are two curious facts: Arthur Machen’s birth name is Arthur Llewellyn Jones; mine is Ronald Jones—could we be cousins? And I named my eldest daughter Sarah Llewellyn Deahl. Be that as it may, seeking Grace in the natural world is a practice I also share with Henry David Thoreau, a writer who has influenced my work for six decades. Being open to nature helps us see behind the materialist and corrupt society that obscures our vision. This belief also underpins the paintings of Tom Thomson and his special relationship with Algonquin Park, where he found the true Canada. Thomson allowed our land to speak for itself through visual images. Therefore, landscapes like Dolly Sods in West Virginia and the Canadian Shield here in Ontario are crucial to me and to my poetry.

Elana Wolff: Thank you for this glimpse behind the curtain, James, for articulating your faith in “Grace,” which I’m taking to mean the kindness that the “Creator” demonstrates to “flawed humans” through the phenomena of the physical world. Your practice of seeking connection with “Grace” in nature sets you in company with Thoreau, as you say. You also name Blake and Yeats—the mystics, and your alertness to the mysterious is clarion throughout the work. I counted eight uses of the word “mystery” as the poems reach for the hidden, the inexplicable; seek to “enter the mystery,” the “infinite mystery.” It’s interesting that you point to having a common birth name—Jones—with Welsh writer and Church of England mystic, Arthur Machen, and wonder if you might be cousins. Well, if not actual blood-cousins—Jones is a common name—then certainly soul-cousins, or kindred spirits. I too have felt a certain kinship—with Prague modernist writer, Franz Kafka, whose life and work have long been a preoccupation of mine. And Kafka himself once wrote in a letter that he considered his true blood-relations to be four authors—Grillparzer, Dostoevsky, Kleist and Flaubert—not only because of his affinity for their writing, but also because of his identification with aspects of their lives. This curious kind of connectivity is probably not uncommon.

James, at the end of my previous comment, I mentioned your reference to “Death’s body divided by four.” I’m wondering if you might offer some insight into what is, for me, a particularly mysterious phrase.

James Deahl: As Robert Duncan stated so well, “We are in the mystery of the name.” Being intelligent and curious creatures, we want to understand who we are and why we are here, yet we find ourselves enveloped by the mystery of being. No amount of science can pierce this mystery. Religion attempts to offer ideas, but these must be taken on faith, and faith is something that is far too scarce in today’s materialistic world. Most people simply blunder through life as best they can, not that that’s such a bad thing in and of itself. Not everyone is called on to be a philosopher. But writers and, in fact, artists of all kinds, do want to investigate the world, they seek the Divine using whatever gifts they possess. Although an artist may not think about it in these terms, I believe great art is a journey towards the Creator, even when the art meanders in a most confused and circuitous way. After all, we can only be flawed individuals.

As to “Death’s body divided by four,” that refers to people executed by being drawn and quartered, an extremely brutal way to kill a traitor. Strange to say, when I wrote that poem in Toronto, I had no idea that years later I would live in Hamilton, where a court passed that sentence for the final time in Canada. This hideous act took place on what are now the grounds of Dundurn Castle, quite an idyllic spot today. Our great poet of the history of Upper Canada, John B. Lee, writes about this atrocity, and makes it real, thus keeping history alive.

Elana Wolff: Thank you for this discerning response, James; “… we find ourselves enveloped by the mystery of being.” There’s just so much we cannot know—about the self, the world, the “Divine”—and the not knowing spurs the searching—by way of nature, art, myth, ritual, religion, relationship. Mystery is the condition, and the search for self/other and the “Divine” an interminable search—at times gratified by glimmerings of knowing and assistance along the way. The “Divine” glimpsed and felt comes through in your poetry: “human vision bordering on revelation” in “Tea Lake Dam,” for example; and the “grace notes” from the beaver pond in “Drowned Land” that “[move you] to pray.”

The drawing and quartering reference in “Death’s body divided by four” is an aspect of ‘fourness’ that hadn’t occurred to me. And what an eerie connection—that you wrote these words in Toronto and later made your home in Hamilton where this brutal capital punishment was last carried out on what were the grounds of Dundurn Castle: “an idyllic spot today.” Poet laureate John B. Lee’s way of keeping history like this “alive,” as you say, might be considered a kind of ‘witness literature’, which, at its purest, seeks to engage readers in critical issues, awaken awareness to “that-which-occurred”—to use Carolyn Forché’s designation.

You too might be called a poet of history. You work with dates, ancient names/places and weave myth in with history: “Hermes bearing the / thick fruit of compulsion”; “Lilith / dark boots / with red edgings”; you juxtapose the “Old,” the enduring/still-present, and frequently invoke “time,” which is, of course, inextricably linked to notions of history. You have: “Time thus / mirrors the span of human life—” (in the Prologue to “No Star Is Lost”); “Waiting, as we wait, / at the edge of winter / as time moves on the face of darkness” (in “Hamilton”); and the very mysterious (at least to me): “… all things / become the same thing / with the passage of time.” (in “Camp Chapel”) … I may be way off, but it seems that the time of which you speak is not ‘time of the clock’, or of science, but rather time as experienced personally. Akin perhaps to French philosopher Henri Bergson’s notion of duration—durée—time as an inner processing, apprehended through imagination and/or intuition.

James Deahl: I’m glad you mentioned time, because I have strong views on that topic. But before we discuss time, and at the risk of introducing a non sequitur into our conversation, perhaps we could again consider the importance of the number four. A man can be drawn and quartered because he has four limbs: two legs and two arms. There are the four seasons and the four directions, as you’ve mentioned, and the four phases to our lunar month: new moon, waxing quarter, full moon, and waning quarter. Also important to my poetry are the four elements: fire, earth, water, and air. Or how about Conquest, War, Famine, and Death: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Like it or not, these Four Horsemen are always with us. People like to see their world in terms of four.

As for time, quite important in my work, I believe there are two kinds: social time and absolute time. In my poetry I refer to social time. I can say that my wife, Gilda Mekler, predeceased me and died on February 7, 2007. Then following a gap of a few years, I married Norma West Linder in 2011. And later, after a dozen years of marriage, Norma predeceased me on August 26, 2023. That suggests a sequence of events with actual dates attached to them, and is correct within our social world. But time in that sense was invented by people to help them think about things. You see, time as sequence is not at all like gravity, or matter, or energy, or magnetic fields. Those things exist independent of us. The fact is that we all live in the eternal present of our Creator’s consciousness: all our “history” is present to our Creator. In absolute terms, there is no yesterday, today, and tomorrow. There is only the Divine now. My parents may be dead, as are my wives, yet we all are alive in our Creator’s consciousness. Of course, this is part of the mystery of being. It has more to do with theology and philosophy than with science; it is, as you say, in the realm of imagination and intuition.

Much of “No Star Is Lost” was written at Hiorra (a now extinct hamlet in West Virginia) beside the house my grandfather Ulysses Deahl built and where my father and his siblings were born or at Camp Chapel, where Ulysses and scores of my relatives lie buried. But to both me and, more importantly, to the Creator, they all live. Do I understand this? No. But I embrace the mystery.

Elana Wolff: I’m glad you returned to the importance of the number four. The aspects of ‘fourness’ that you’ve named all meaningfully inform your work: the seasons, the cardinal directions, the moon and its phases, the elements, and yes, the Horsemen too, particularly the non-metaphorical topic of War in human history—the “Great War / and all it engendered.” (in “Grey Day in the North”) There’s also the association of four with femaleness in your work. The square was the pre-eminent (ancient) symbol for earth/mother/goddess, and the aspect of the feminine underpins your work as well. The collection is dedicated to four women: your mother, Dorothy Deahl, and to your three wives—Shirley Deahl, Gilda Mekler, and Norma West Linder. Your views on time are intimately connected to these women, and to your forbears; in fact, to humanity as a whole: “we all live in the eternal present of our Creator’s consciousness: all our “history” is present to our Creator. In absolute terms, there is only … the Divine now”; as humans, we can only dwell in sequential time. I’ll add that even those who side with science also imagine and intuit. No one cannot escape the mystery of being.

On another time-related note, I’d like to ask you about the role of music in this work—music being an artform that unfolds in time, is structured by time signatures, and can be said to affect one’s perception of time. In your first long poem, you have “Hedy West singing / ‘Single Girl’ / ‘Cotton Mill Girls”; jazz musician “Eric Dolphy on alto”; and “two guitarists play[ing] / a relaxed version / of the song ‘Green Dolphin Street’.” And in “North Point”—your 14-part poem inspired by Tom Thomson’s paintings, “Beethoven’s dark tones” are called up, and art and nature combine to invoke a “canto negro.”

James Deahl: The relationship or tension between our human world of art and music, of Tom Thomson and Beethoven, that seems to be confined within sequential time, underpins the meditations of a couple of mystical Catholics whose work has sustained me in times of need: San Juan de la Cruz and Thomas Merton. And the music of our world is frequently a dark song, a canto negro, like one finds so beautifully articulated in the early poetry of Federico García Lorca.

You mention the aspect of the feminine in my work. Women have been central to my life. My grandmother Ella Dauber, my mother, my three wives, and my three daughters will always have a place in my heart and in my thoughts and prayers. When I ran headlong into feminism—or it ran into me—very early in the 1970s the impact was a profound shock, and emotionally painful, too. As a result, I spent the decade studying a couple dozen feminist texts. That deep reading of feminist prose, along with the work of poets like Denise Levertov, Lorna Crozier, and my dear friend Dorothy Livesay, whose books I admire, informs “In The Lost Horn’s Call” as well as my later work.

These concerns underscore the dynamic of my poetry. Not everyone is inspired by both San Juan de la Cruz and Dorothy Livesay. Or by Taoism, for that matter. But then, I’m the only person I know who will, with equal enthusiasm, listen to Eric Dolphy solos one night and Chopin nocturnes the next.

Elana Wolff: Thank you for your generous responses, James. I have to say that I am inspired by the range of your concerns, heartened by your sensibilities. And I’m with you on diversity in music. I can listen to Beethoven’s late string quartets in the morning, Van Morrison and Sigur Rós in the afternoon, and Arvo Pärt or the great requiems in the evening. Jazz and nocturnes too.

I began our conversation by saying that even before I opened your book I was intrigued by the title. Four-Square Poems, for me, is a title that sets a tone and invites inquiry; we’ve spoken about the various aspects of its significance. I’d like to follow up on the importance of cover art, typeface, paper stock, and layout—your view on how aspects of design and production affect a reader’s experience of a work of poetry.

James Deahl: I believe that the presentation of literature is important. I have more than once bought a book or a record LP (I’m a fan of vinyl recordings) based on cover/jacket art and design. And I always like to have some control over the internal text of my books; it should be attractive and easy to read. That said, poetry is made to be heard, not read. The book is just a stand-in for the live reading. And I have vinyl LPs of poets reading their work: Dylan Thomas, Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn MacEwen, etc. The CBC used to do this sort of thing.

Elana Wolff: Yes, poetry is meant to be heard. A live reading—especially by an author who reads well—is a boon to the work. For the most part, however, we have to be satisfied with the words on the page.

I’d like to close by quoting American poet Christian Wiman from his luminous book, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer: “… it is essential to keep one’s little patch of language pure, to reconcile oneself to nothing that has not passed through the crucible of one’s most intense experiences and thoughts.” In my eyes, James, Four-Square Poems meets this standard of the essential. Thank you for joining me in conversation.

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Elana Wolff's cross-genre Kafka-quest work, Faithfully Seeking Franz (Guernica Editions, 2023), received the 2024 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the category of Jewish Thought and Culture. Her eighth book of poems is forthcoming in 2026.