“Erase history if you dare. She returns on furious wings.”

It seems an all-too-apt maxim for our times, given the havoc and outright atrocities being committed by leaders around the world – some of them directly beyond our borders. In this collection of vivid, intensely personal poems, Ulrich Wendt distills a lifetime of activism and philosophical observations shaped by his early experiences as a post-war refugee and his life in Canada.

The poems are wildly diverse, and I mean that in a good way. At times they reflect his puzzlement with the change in people’s attitudes, reflected, for example, in “The Country’s Full”, where he describes an encounter with an old friend who unexpectedly reveals a biased, even racist, point of view regarding “all those brown people with the weird names and turbans and things”.

At other times, though, he expresses his belief – his certainty – that hope, courage, and love, however fragile, continue to coexist with fear and trembling in this uncertain world. That even, as he writes, “the drying, dying river / Is beautiful in its despair”. In these poems, Wendt encourages us not to forget the lessons of the past but to remember the journey. And move forward.

On Furious Wings, new and selected poems by Ulrich Wendt, is available as a Kindle Edition on Amazon.ca.