Got No Flag at All

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

Michael Holmes has talent to burn. Sometimes he seems merely to burn it,
to squander it. He writes mostly about urban life among the down-and-out
in Toronto, and the subjects are sometimes too trivial or too clearly
meant to shock by their unrelenting sordidness. But his lines are
wonderfully paced and his diction often astonishes. He is perhaps a
little too fond of adjectives. In these poems, he very skilfully creates
a world of shoplifters, tattoos, jazz, and unpredictable violence. His
characters are often immigrants—he seems to know the Portuguese very
well—and his settings are Kensington Market, Danforth Avenue, and
immigrant neighborhoods. He is also preoccupied with fish and fishing.
After the reader has become accustomed to the sprawling, open-form
poetics of the lines, Holmes breaks all expectations of his style with
the tightly knit sequence “The Piscatorial Sonnets,” where every
word and every pause appear to have been chosen with great deliberation.
This is an impressive first book.