Alterations is a book of arrival at beginnings. When George Payerle finally escaped city life, he returned to the coast into which he had been born when Vancouver was a much smaller town -- a coast where the mountains fall into the sea as waves of rainforest. This is a coast of "shadow weather" amongst cedars and fir, where the light of everyday is a Turner painting, a land/seascape suffused with the spirit made visible.
In these poems the old coast of logging and fishing is all but extinct, inhabited by ghosts of men with peaveys in their hands and bulldozers in their eyes. Ghosts with the power to inform us, like the rusted logskidder's arch standing by the highway as though it were a dinosaur's hipbones.
Alterations continues the musical meditations of Payerle's Last Trip to Oregon, which memorialized the death of his friend, the poet Charles Lillard. The music has moved towards Bach's cello suites and Jan Garbarek's loon-like saxophone. The serenity achieved through mourning the death of a friend has moved into transcendent contemplation of the diurnal and the extraordinary -- garbage day, George W's baleful face, Vancouver Island rising like a tsunami in the west, the return of a prodigal daughter -- transcendent but never without pain, or death -- language many-jewelled as the fangs of "these wolves herding prey toward consummation, and tender yet as ewes with lamb."