There Is No Falling

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Robert Hogg has adopted a form that is not appropriate for his content.
“Father Father” exemplifies his problem. Intended as a tribute to
Hogg’s father, the poem exhibits the characteristic weakness of
imagism and the schools that grew out of it: choppiness of flow and the
inability to create a sustained line of thought. Hogg has remained truer
to Tish poetics (which owe a lot to imagism filtered through Black
Mountain) than have his comrades Bowering and Davey, but perhaps it’s
time he moved on. Although the form does work in a very short poem such
as “Early Morning, January,” it is not suitable for meditative
verse.

Hogg must also be faulted for an inability to digest his influences.
Here is a passage from “Word / a Postmodern epic”: “love of
language / or love of self / makes me look past / this oak-handled /
hammer to the feel / of the wood the classic / knurl of its head so that
/ I pick it up.” Kroetsch’s voice is drowning out Hogg’s.

Hogg has been a poet for nigh on 30 years. It’s time for him to move
beyond yesterday’s experiments and on to tomorrow’s.