Spells for Clear Vision

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

Neile Graham’s second book is a distinguished collection, with
considerable range in theme and style. She has a strong sense of the
line and the way that sentence rhythms can play against line and stanza
units. “My Father Among the Mayans” has an extraordinary sentence,
drawn out over 20 lines, in which the father climbs a mound: the
sentence makes the struggle of the climb tangible. Her diction is always
straightforward and her meanings are clear but her work is not
superficial. The subjects of the poems include a grandmother’s
experience of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a series on photographs
of Crow tribesmen, and a hectic day in New York. The poet’s
imagination seems able to go anywhere, though she deals most often with
the Pacific Rim and the far west. Her work has led her to close contact
with Native peoples and her poems often grow out of such encounters,
without any attempt to appropriate other cultures. Here and there in the
poems, the moments of insight or reconciliation come a little too
easily, but all in all this is indeed a collection of “spells for
clear vision.”