The Lost and Found

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

Aaron is a poet from Ottawa who now lives in Israel. The Israeli setting
gives color to the poems, but doesn’t really help with their stylistic
limitations. The most interesting poems place the words on a lined
diagram, with diagonal lines connecting some of them: these graphic
experiments have some possibilities, though the poems themselves
aren’t very powerful. Too many of the other poems deal with love or
sex in a predictable and adolescent fashion: there is lots of voluptuous
hair (usually blonde and long) in these poems, and the emotions are not
very deep. A poem like “Wholesale,”—which reads, in its entirety,
“volume lover / great turnover / Audrey”—suggests the sentiments
of a Catullus or Yehudi Amichai, but not their indelible styles. “The
Best Weapon,” a poem about an Israeli woman soldier, describes her
rather predictably as a long-haired blonde with upturned breasts and
suggests that her sexuality would be a great weapon for peace, but
concludes stereotypically that she is “like all weapons / destined to
destroy.” Aaron has genuine lyrical talent, but this collection seems
to be another case of premature publication by a young poet.