Towards 2000: Poetry for the Future

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

The concept of this anthology is an interesting one: it contains poems
about the future as a means of showing how poets, whom Ezra Pound called
“the antennae of the race,” imagine the future as we move toward the
year 2000. There are some fine poems here by writers like Michael
Ondaatje, Rhona McAdam, Don Kerr, Anne Szumigalski, Joe Rosenblatt, and
Robert Bringhurst. However, the success rate is not extremely high and
the anthology lacks direction. Some of the poems really do imagine the
future; some merely look in its direction while discussing other
matters. The introductions by the two editors are rather brief and full
of platitudes. Authors’ notes would have helped put the poems into
context, especially since some of the writers are not widely known. This
is not a bad anthology, but it is not an essential one.