Chris Semansky's poetry, essays, and stories appear regularly in literary magazines and journals. In the following essay, Semansky explores how Birney uses the imagery of light and darkness in "Vancouver Lights" to question and comment on the meaning of human existence.

For most of his life Earle Birney was a relentless traveler and seeker of new experiences, concerned as much with the processes of becoming as he was with the work of being. Raised on the outskirts of the Canadian wilderness, Birney was also acutely attuned to nature and its processes. His best poems embrace both his passion for exploration of life's meaning and his experience with the natural world. "Vancouver Lights," included in David and Other Poems, his first collection, is one such poem. In it, Birney uses light and darkness in their various and varied forms as its central metaphoric images, allowing him to meditate...