You Don't Get to Be a Saint

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

Patrick Friesen is an excellent poet, but this book is a little too
clogged with words and unassimilated emotions to be fully successful.
Friesen’s experiments with the long line filled with a rush of phrases
and sentences continue. So far his line is an instrument more suited to
registering raw feeling than to recollecting it in artistic tranquility.
The long elegy for the singer Richard Manuel, Friesen’s second work on
this subject, lacks an inner understanding of Manuel’s torments. It
merely speculates, and the respectful intentions can’t salvage the
poem. The experiments in the “Anna” poems with using some material
twice are interesting, but juxtaposing Anna Akhmatova’s heroic life
with trivial personal recollections and odd anecdotes seems
disproportionate. Friesen holds the reader’s attention when he writes
with more compression in later poems in the book: themes and emotions
are more clearly in control. He is capable of a tremendous lyricism. His
desire to find a more capacious form is admirable, even if the results
are not always successful. He will doubtless find his way to using the
sweeping forms with the precision of his shorter lyrical works.