In a plea for living simple, we often forget to look back at simplicity and remember. Perennial Fields is a collection of poetry accumulated over the span of a couple years. Written and compiled by Dan Darrah—a Ryerson University alumni, it shows the author’s vast understanding of choosing the “right” words to evoke nostalgia, and a reliving of one’s past. The book itself is beautifully bound in a light blue cover, offering a glimpse of the theme of the poem inside. The diction and syntax of the pieces trigger remembrances of youthful experience while displaying a staggering understanding of structure. With the formulaic Haikus, which mark a break in theme and language,  Darrah guides into a framework of emotional searching, a quest for meaning in poems that appear to be about us. 

Darrah asks us to briefly give ourselves up to his world, so we feel the nostalgia of simply existing. The joys of tea, of reading Kafka, of giving yourself to love, and of remembering your friends, old and new. Specifically in “Sunday,” he is asking us to live simply, he is asking us to just exist; to break dishes, to love, and to remember what this all means. Here, Darrah’s work performs like a claw machine, picking up a toy, swinging side-to-side, and placing it gently, sometimes even abruptly, as it catches on the edge of the glass cage, right into his world; an immersive experience that engulfs us. These poems evoke nostalgia the way it is supposed to be known, in abstract terms, in ways that can’t quite be held, but felt. 

This empathy is especially pungent in poems such as “What It Carries,” “Damn Love Field,” “When Stacy Called,” and “Transmission Curves.” While not mutually exclusive to these poems alone, the feeling boils over the page, leaving us with a frown, a smile, or even a warm feeling of yesterday. The highlight of the whole collection lies within “Your Third Coffee.” The eclectic structure and free-verse style brings a sense of dizzying gyration. These poems read like we’re sitting on a train, experiencing a piece of metafiction, and suggesting a nod to living in a megacity with thoughts elsewhere—small town Canada, an unidentified coastal town. Darrah pokes at our desire of hope for a simple life, and requests we find the meaning in the mundane. Even if that requires finding our individual meaning within his work. As with “Your Third Coffee,”the work entitled “You Thank Kafka” offers that same feeling as before, yet a soft spot exists with me at the sheer mention of Kafka, the existential dread of trying to find that meaning, Kafka can help highlight it, and Darrah’s poems help resolve it. Perhaps, Darrah is asking us to address existential despair, or perhaps he just wants us to read. 

Perennial Fields is a young, and honest, attempt at finding meaning in a world that is oftentimes meaningless, and an honest effort to ask the same from us. While Darrah creates a universe, and a realistic one at that, he expects the readers to identify the feeling and the meaning of the space around them. Through a guided and interwoven world, Darrah shows this is possible. Darrah’s unstructured work gives a semblance of hope for the future, for one filled with meaning.