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L ong known as a poet, as well as a playwright, teacher, musician and translator, Vancouver poet Patrick Friesen recently released Interim: Essays & Mediations, a collection of non-fiction pieces written over a period of some twenty years. Paul Wilson's Hagios Press, founded a few years ago in Regina, has been publishing a number of interesting books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including a thirtieth anniversary edition of Andrew Suknaski's Wood Mountain Poems (2006), and manages to provide an interesting counterpoint to the work being produced by Saskatchewan peers Coteau Books in Regina, and Thistledown Press in Saskatoon. In Interim, Patrick Friesen works through a number of concerns he's had over the years and worked through many of his twelve poetry collections including religion, family, travel, memory, poetry, music and geography, most of which have all existed through his poetry for years. As his Introduction begins, "At forty I begin to realize I had a history." He writes further on into the piece:

Part of this book is a recognition of that history, a history that is both apart from, and a part of, me; a history of how the adult learns to misplace what's true, and sometimes finds a way back. Finding some of these pieces made me curious. Where had some particular idea come from, where had the tone in another piece come from, or gone to? Contradictions everywhere but, then, contradictions are not a problem; the elimination of them can be. When working back years through anyone's published work, it's easy to see the threads that weave from collection to collection, poem to poem, and Friesen's concerns in Interim: Essays & Mediations are ones that he has had inside his body perhaps the entire stretch of his life. Working through religion, family and music, the threads become so intertwined throughout twenty-eight short prose pieces that they become nearly inseparable. As he begins the piece "There Was Always Music," he writes:

From the beginning there was music. Can't remember a time it wasn't there in one form or another. Probably the greatest constant in my life. Mother was always singing. Hymns sometimes but often English folk songs, Scottish and Irish ballads. She had a fine soprano voice, often sang in church. Once, when she was about twenty-one years old, and me a one-year-old child in my father's lap, she recorded "O Holy City" in some walk-in recording joint on Portage Avenue in Winnipeg. Cost her a dollar or so. I know this happened. I own the recording, the date on it. She also played the piano a lot. Often, at the end of the day, with me lying in bed. Playing me to sleep.

What makes the book so effective is the accidental deliberateness of it as a whole; even though some of these pieces were written some ten, fifteen or even twenty years apart, they flow very naturally one into the other, and work almost as some sort of memoir of Friesen's thinking life. Born in Steinbach, Manitoba and raised in a Mennonite community just outside of Winnipeg, Friesen lived in Winnipeg for most of his adult life, until moving to Vancouver in the 1990s, where he currently teaches at Kwantlen University College. Over the years, Friesen has published eleven trade collections of poetry, including the lands i am (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1976), bluebottle (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1978), The Shunning (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1980), Unearthly Horses (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1984), Flicker and Hawk (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1987), You Don't Get To Be a Saint (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1992), Blasphemer's Wheel: Selected and New Poems (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1994), A Broken Bowl (London ON: Brick Books, 1997), St. Mary at Main (Winnipeg MB: The Muses' Company, 1998), Carrying The Shadow (Vancouver BC: Beach Holme Publishing, 1999), the breath you take from the lord (Madeira Park BC: Harbour Publishing, 2002) and the chapbook Bordello Poems (Vancouver BC: Vancouver Film School, 2004), as well as two CDs, small rooms and Calling the Dog Home, two plays, The Shunning (which he adapted from the book) (Toronto ON: Playwrights Union of Canada, 1987) and The Raft, and three translations he did from Danish with Per Brask, God's Blue Morris by Niels Hav (Crane Editions, 1993), The Woods by Klaus Høeck (Crane Editions, 1998) and A Sudden Sky by Ulrikka Gernes (London ON: Brick Books, ). Talking about his (as he called it) "terrain of southeastern Manitoba" in an interview with Clarice Foster in CV2 magazine in 2002, Friesen states:

That's where I was seeded. That's were I grew up. This terrain, its climate, flora and fauna, its people, everything, are ingrained in me as a human, as a writer. I live on the west coast, and I grow to know more about it all the time, but it won't ever be me. I am that prairie, specifically southeastern Manitoba, "kid." It informs everything I do. It is my thinking. I think prairie, whatever that means (another conversation). That doesn't mean it doesn't connect with thinking going on elsewhere. It does. It's not, to my mind, provincialism; it's just another angle.

In his piece "13 Ways of Looking at Pat Friesen" in Contemporary Manitoba Writers (ed. Kenneth James Hughes, Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1990), prairie writer and critic Wayne Tefs' ways on the work of Patrick Friesen echo many of the concerns that Friesen himself admits to in his own series of pieces, with headers such as "Child of Adamantine Soil," "Student of Spiritual Quests," "Image-Forger," "Son," "The Man Who Fell from Grace," "Student of Love" and "The Mennonite in Spite of Himself." As Tefs writes in the final section of his essay:

So Friesen joins his Christian ancestors' wilderness trek between the garden and the desert, between the golden age and the millennium. The locus of his spiritual quest is, of course, radically different than his forebears'. Eclectic, secular and carnal. Yet Friesen finds himself alongside them in some important respects, searching in a divided world for spiritual values to make men whole again. Driven even, toward what he calls truth. "I am impatient for that loss," a Christian poet of our century writes, "by which the spirit gains." Pat Friesen might embrace that sentiment, asserting as it does the regeneration of goodness out of the intractable negatives of broken contemporary experience.

After years of watching his poetry develop, it's interesting to see the thinking behind the writing (as it often is, with any writer), whether writing of poetics or various areas of content he has worked through over the years; there is even a piece on developing his poetry collection The Shunning for stage, writing the process of turning his own words around, so that they are finally and quickly known better by the actors performing them than the man who originally wrote them. Long seen as a meditative poet, this series of mediations and meditations has Friesen thinking out loud, and negotiating his way through the world and the different collusions that exist among his own concerns, writing out ideas and connections, even through seeming contradictions. As he begins the piece "Without a Bow Tie," writing:

I have no formal poetics. I have spoken about poetics, written about it, and I have contradicted myself. What seems clear one day is not on another. Then, something that was unclear, or even invisible, suddenly emerges. My capacity to organize all this into some kind of coherent poetics is practically nil. I don't think its organization is of any benefit to anyone, particularly to me.

I write poems, but I'm not sure I'm a poet, or whether what I write is poetry. Who defines it? What does it mean? I am astonished by many poets, knowing I cannot write as they do. But, then, I wonder why I would even think for a moment that I should. Undoubtedly, I use certain techniques, some with long tradition, some more recent. I know I'm not very consistent.

Just speaking, where I'm from, as far as I'm aware, and where I'm going, as far as I'm aware. Trying to be awake to what's inside, and to what's around me. I've learned from many. I don't break any new ground. It's all been said and done.