Let's Hear It for Them

Peter Baltensperger is the editor and publisher of Moonstone Press and
the author of Arcana.

Noble’s fourth collection of poems consists of five long poems and a
“Postscriptum,” representing previously published as well as
previously performed works by the Alberta writer.

The book opens with “Coffee,” a series of tableaus intertwining an
array of characters in and against a backdrop of various landscapes.
“Opera,” like “Coffee,” is chiefly narrative. It deals primarily
with family relationships, with what we are and what we were perhaps
meant to be, and with parent-child and child-parent interactions.
“Interview,” which oscillates between questions and answers, is
written partly in prose poetry, partly in disjointed, typographically
demanding lines connecting and bridging the prose passages. “Props,”
the shortest poem in the collection (two pages), concentrates on farming
and philosophy—two of Noble’s favorite pursuits, according to the
back-cover blurb. “Grounds” is a complex, 34-page opus of
“letters” addressed to such recipients as a slice of cake, a slice
of whale, time, a doctor, a yo-yo, a quotation, a formula, The Globe and
Mail, and “it,” and signed by, among others, The Coaching Stiff,
Dead Air Dick, and A Bit Put/Out. The “letters” are supplemented by
postscripts and an assortment of observations, diatribes, dialogues, and
other devices. Finally, “Postscriptum Re The Hysterical Male: Behind
Master Mind Up On Time Misprisioners [sic] Once Escape Literature”
presents two suites of prose poems; “Asymmetrical Signs” in five
sections, and “A Suite of Single Symmetries” in five movements.

This book is for a select readership that delights in esoterics and
experimentation, and may be able to do justice to such a collection.