Raspberrying

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

Neufeldt grew up in Yarrow, B.C., the heart of the Fraser Valley
raspberry-growing industry. Every poem in this delightful collection
turns on some aspects of the raspberry: the growing, picking, and
packing of them. He manages to write about a great many other topics in
passing, exploring family and community life in the town with wit and
compassion. A few of the poems, like “Box Factory Girls,” are too
long and circumstantial, but generally he is right on target. The style
is easy-going and rarely calls attention to itself until the reader is
suddenly struck by a brilliant detail, as in the conclusion of “The
’48 Flood,” which drowned “salamanders, spiders, stray cats,”
and “the idiot daughter who looked older than her parents by the time
she learned to wash herself.” Wordsworth and Coleridge took for
granted that the primary object of poetry is to give pleasure, and
Neufeldt’s unusual collection fulfils that object very well.