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There are parts of our minds and souls about which we rarely speak. We all experience terrible emotional hardship during our lives, and in his collection of poems Let me burn like this, Wade Kearley explores just that-reflections and emotions confessed to the reader where nature and seasons suggest the progression of time. Often set in a specific season, Kearley concentrates on autumn in anticipation of the winter of our lives when we often reflect on our successes and obsess on our failures. What makes Kearley different is that he includes dark moods most of us would not even admit to feeling and effectively uses the edgy natural beauty of his home province, Newfoundland, to describe these raw and more sinister emotions. Does he make us uncomfortable by showing us a darker side? Decidedly yes. But making us uncomfortable - making us squirm when we read about another's deepest feelings - is what successful poetry is all about.

In the first poem, "The Detour," Kearley portends the arrival of fall and winter by portraying the changes in his garden as ominous - something to avoid. The garden "slumps under the threat of frost. / On yellowing tomato vines, hard green fruit refuse the fattening blush. / Scarred beans collapse …" (1) Kearley uses the time of year to indicate man's life-cycle, autumn representing life past its productive stage, and demonstrates his particular sensitivity to the changes of life as he simply pads among the dying flowers in his garden. While in the first poem, the writer actually uses the word "threat" when referring to the coming frost, in "Nurseryman" he expresses an uneasiness about the fact that his daughter has grown up and that he does not really know her. He nostalgically recalls the "tiny socks hiding at the back of a drawer." (2) But he doesn't remember her maturing. More profoundly, he says "In the mirror this morning / the scarred face staring back was a generation older, / couldn't break the frown until / I spied the young man. He winked at me." (2) At this stage, Kearley seems to be surprised that age has crept up on him, but his growing older is only reflected on the exterior while feelings inside seem to lag behind.

While age alters us both physically and mentally, the changes in our feelings are more subtle. Kearley suggests that sexual desire, though changed, is still there. In "Everything I cannot surrender," the poet again describes the old man in the mirror, writing, "He wants what I cannot have. The women / he craves are somewhere between my wife / and my daughters, and so far away / that suicide seems to be the shortest cut." (16) In a final lament, he writes to the man in the mirror, "'Love, vows, commitment, it's all a smokescreen. / You could have fought harder for what I want.'" (16) In "Shem at the brothel," the writer fantasizes that a woman is making sexual advances to him even though her boyfriend is sitting near her. When she leaves, he writes that an apple rolls from another woman's lap, and he makes advances by taking a bite of the apple. "I want that ruby, want it whole and sliced / to bare the witch's star that bewitches me." (17) And again in "Pickpocket fantasia," he trolls a food court supposedly looking for ways to steal money, but instead says, "I search for uncrossed legs and fail / to find the patch of underwear, the cleavage …" (18) But the poet's relationships with women and family have changed. What he fantasizes about is not what actually exists in his time of life, in his family. In "Lunar Lament" when an eclipse of the moon leaves his household in darkness, he describes his family as "Strangers, brief shadows, / sliding obliquely / across each other's lives." (3) And in "Explaining away desire," he is actually relieved that he no longer yearns for his mistress as he did when he also had a family and children. "I've cut that barbed wire from my flesh. / I'm desperate to be grateful for that." (10)

Kearley also contends that age makes one regret past mistakes. In "A refusal not to mourn the death of a child by fire," he admits that his inability to grieve over the death of his child made him unable to move on, "I tremble in the driveway, / turn my back on the moonrise to forget / every embrace, every sleepless to bed." (4) At the end of the poem, he says "Since she died, I have wasted my life." (4) In "Day of the dead," Kearley laments that wisdom has come too late to have prevented mistakes, "What good is the little I know / when it comes so late?" (44) More specifically, the poet reveals that he failed at least one relationship he sought. He acknowledges that even though the woman may not have interest in him, he urged it on until he fell in love, and when she left him, "took a bullet in the chest." (53) He reveals his regret a few lines later when he writes, "I hide here alone / inside my family, / ashamed / of my wound, afraid / it will explode inside me." (53)

But once we pass from the fall of our lives into the winter when death seems to be imminent, the writer worries that old age has been misrepresented, "A pendulum of ponytails skips up the sidewalk, / chases the stuttering squirrels, and disappears / into someone else's life, softly mocking us / for the way we thought this age would be." (43) He is indignant that while trying to be "good" and doing what was expected in life, he had made mistakes. In "A crack in the chimney," the poet says:

I have no time to dawdle
at this imperfect art, no time to mimic,
no slow discourse, just time to steal words,
stack them, learning too late that obedience -
has stolen my life, conned me into believing all men are equal and          opportunity abounds. (45)

With all his anger, the writer realizes that death is near, and the thought of it makes him squirm. He writes, "Sheltered on my garden bench, I mull the sight / of this wormy plot. Every autumn-torn leaf / unsettled. The smell of ripe compost calls uneasily …" (44) But in "Poison-dart frog," he finally admits that he has actually grown old, "Underfoot my hot water bottle denies the chill, / tempts me with its warm, webbed flesh. / But time is running out." (47)

In spite of a strong regrets and a question about what the writer has left to live for, Kearley still suggests that he wants to live. He writes of the poison frog, "I crave a lick of its intoxicating skin, the immortality / of its delicate limbs that, when severed, regenerate completely." (47) In "Black spruce sapling," he describes a tree buried in the ice that has accumulated on the surface of a stream. Despite its ineffectual attempts to pull completely away from the danger of being snapped in two, it still struggles to be free, "At the verge of snapping, the sapling jerked upward, / heavy crystal limbs flicking water upstream. / Under weight of its icy coat, the tree slowly dipped / again until the current caught it once more by the sleeve." (48)

But the fact that winter has arrived is important. Death is portrayed as something beyond our control in "The fall from Devil's Rock." When the writer slips over a cliff, he catches on the lip of a rock and attempts to hold on as he calls his friend for help. He writes, "I remember someone whispering / strange jagged words, telling me / to let go. Maybe I fell then, / broken at the devil's foot." (50) He claims he thought it was his friend that grabbed his jacket and told him to let go. On the other hand, acceptance is an important part of the process. In "Burning lilac," the poet burns lilac junks - a symbol of summer - from his yard. He writes, "That winter my memory stung with tears. / Through the blur I see white lilac blossoms / swirl and drift outside …" (55) In the end, the poet accepts impending death and describes what he wants for a funeral:

Pile on the logs,
keep it blazing long into the night,
so when friends and lovers gaze
from their windows they'll see,
in the flames, nothing more
than a light by which to better see
the lover who stands beside them. (56)

Through the passage of time, it is often difficult to see the events of our lives without a tinge of knowledge or wisdom making us rue how we responded at the time. While we might regret the mistakes with our relationships later, the "searing nugget" (10) of attraction that Kearley describes is so real at the time that when we cheat on our spouses and families we blame genetics. While manhood is important when we are young, that often fades, and we might not be so quick to kill or maim when we are older. As we look back on our failures, our goals, perhaps we expected too much. In "The damned," Kearley describes the men who build a cathedral. The work "to bolster this fools' tower / of sandstone, built too high / to bear its own weight. / It demands a benediction / of blood and flesh and spit." (30) Is the message here to go easy on ourselves? Only the reader can determine that. Only the reader can understand and identify with the deep emotions that Kearley has gone through to reach the conclusions he has in his collection of poems. In "Let me burn like this," he wishes for his funeral to end with a bit of hope, "Let the children dance and reel / over my ashes." (56)