Popping Fuchsias

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

Robin Skelton has turned his considerable technical skills to writing
poems in unusually elaborate poetic forms: pantoums, bref doubles,
kyrielles, rondels, viators, sestinas, lais, villaneles, catena
rondos—the reader will be hard put to find most of these forms in a
handbook on poetics. Some of these “obsessive forms,” as Skelton has
called them elsewhere, are derived from French poetry; others are Welsh.
He uses them with grace, and his afterword has interesting comments on
their uses. There has been a turn toward the formal in contemporary
poetry, and Skelton shows that the turn need not lead to stilted or
awkward poetry.

The limitation of this book is that he seems to have little to say in
these forms. The best section of the book is the first,
“Remembering,” in an elegiac mode. His commemorations of friends and
fellow writers have a particularity often lacking in the later poems,
which tend to deliver some rather platitudinous wisdom: “I understand
no more than do the birds, no more than do the grasses in the garden.”
Skelton, who is clearly writing with an autumnal mode, seems ready, like
his master, Yeats, to wither into truth, but he lacks Yeats’s bite and
passion. Popping fuchsias is a child’s pastime, and too often
Skelton’s poems seem inconsequential.