Ed and Mabel Go to the Moon

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

Canadian writers have often written about loneliness and hard times in
farmhouses. This book deals with this somewhat tired theme. It avoids
melodrama, but it avoids drama, too. Bushkowsky’s individual poems are
often quite adept; he is especially good at using images of sky, wind,
and clouds, prairie trademarks he employs without banality. He also has
a good grasp of casual speech, and in one poem—“ten grown men
reciting poetry at the central cafe coffee counter”—it is
exceptional. His difficulty is in making an interesting narrative out of
the lives of Ed and Mabel, his Prairie Everyman and Everywoman, who love
one another but never achieve full intimacy. While he sometimes evokes
the experience of the two characters vividly, the lack of communication
between them makes the sequence as frustrating as the marriage it
describes. The excessive length of some of the poems works against the
collection; Ed’s final meditation on his farm and marriage goes on too
long in a monotonous style. Thomas Grey’s famous “Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard” spoke of the short and simple annals of the poor.
Bushkowsky’s annals are simple but need to be shorter, and they need
to probe deeper.