Fire Never Sleeps

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

Hartsfield’s poems show wit, a fine sense of detail, and a talent for
metaphor (“the night sky is hot, / newly-tarred”). Her commitment to
the very brief line limits her rhythmic variety; the prose-poems in the
collection show more rhythm than the poems in lines. Her subject matter
is wide: there are excellent love poems, poems about her youth in Texas,
poems about music, and even a poem entitled “Sunset.” Her sharp
particularity in rendering scene and situation doesn’t prevent her
from turning a good aphorism, as in “Trees”: “women can be both
things: / wound and tourniquet.” Several poems are based on Sylvia
Plath’s journals and explore extreme states of mind. The collection as
a whole often deals with pain and stress (what Freud, who appears in the
book, would call “normal neurosis,” the inevitable wear and tear of
life), but the effect is heartening rather than depressing, because the
poems manifest clarity and passion. No illusions here, and no posing
either.