In his next collection of verse, The Great Bear Lake Meditations (1970), Yates begins his first prose poem: "The wolves say to the dogs what the madman of me says to the citizen. I need to go fishing until I need to return." Yates uses the long journey to the North and the stay on the remote lake as springboards for philosophical meditations about sexuality, death, wilderness, fear, absurdity, isolation, and consciousness. Too often, however, the abstractions drain these prose poems of movement and meaning.
In 1971 Sono Nis published Parallax, a collection of prose poems, and The Abstract Beast, a volume in which Yates combines fiction and drama in a surreal landscape that reflects several of his fundamental concerns. The Abstract Beast contains eight of Yates's one-act plays, one of which, The Broadcaster was adapted from the earlier short story. The best-known work in this collection is Night Freight (produced at the Scarborough Theatre in April 1972), a play which Yates describes as "concerned with the subconscious attitudes of men and women who have accrued much time on earth, yet have accumulated little experience." Another successful drama is Theatre of War (produced in Winnipeg in March 1970 and separately published in 1972), in which it is argued that war is the natural state of man.....
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