The Toronto Star called him a legendary figure in Canadian writing,
and indeed George Fetherling has been prolific in many genres: poetry,
history, travel narrative, memoir, and cultural studies. Plans Deranged
by Time is a representative selection from many of the twelve poetry
collections he has published since the late 1960s. Like his novels and
other fiction, many of these poems are anchored in a sense of
place--often a very urban one. Filled with aphorism and sharp
observation, the poems are spare of line and metaphor; they display a
kind of elegant realism: loading docks, back doors of restaurants,
doughnut shops with karate schools upstairs.
In the introduction, A.F. Moritz places Fetherling in the modern
picaresque tradition in the aftermath of Eliot and Pound, highlighting
his characteristic speaker as an itinerant cosmopolitan outsider, a kind
of flâneur, impoverished and keenly observant, writing from a position
of "communion-in-isolation." He contrasts Fetherling's contemplative
intellectualism with that of the public intellectual and highlights this
outsider's fellow-feeling, making the poems indirectly political.
Fetherling's afterword is an anecdote-anchored exploration of what the
poet sees as his two central approaches--"the desire to create new codes
of hearing" and "writing-to-heal"--and how they are reflected in the
collection.