The Mill Under His Skin

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

Weis’s first book has some excellent poems about family relationships.
The title poem, about a difficult stepfather, is very powerful, and he
writes skilfully and movingly about parenthood. He is not so effective
in writing about male-female relationships, though the poems about a
persona called George show an interesting attempt to transcend the usual
male voyeurism by foregrounding it in an ironic way. The poems about
writing are a little self-conscious. Weis’s style is fairly typical of
our period. He’s best at imagery, has flashes of unusual diction and a
few witty sound-effects, and reveals some uncertainty about the role of
the poetic line. This book is a promising start. It will be interesting
to see what artistic maturity brings to Weis’s poetry.