The Perfect Cold Warrior

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

Gary Geddes is best-known for his political poems. This frustrating
collection is divided into three sections, two of which might be called
political. The weakest part of the book is the third section, dealing
with Leon Trotsky on the morning of his assassination. Geddes manages to
make Trotsky, one of the most interesting men in modern history, dull,
apparently in the interest of humanizing him. The second section deals
with the Palestinian intifada. Geddes wishes to counteract the
demonization of the Palestinians in the press. He writes several poems
from the point of view of the Palestinians, which seems presumptuous.
Here and there the images are striking. But the reader may feel that the
poet is not being empathetic as much as he is being opportunistic.
Geddes has pursued social injustice rather doggedly over the years. The
first section is a group of “confessional” poems about his childhood
in a dysfunctional family in Vancouver. The recitation of events and
places never comes alive, though Geddes has skilfully deployed the
self-revelations in elegant stanza patterns to create a tension between
what is said and how it is said. Too many families are dysfunctional for
Geddes’s revelations to be very surprising. This is not one of
Geddes’s better books.