The Spell of Memory

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

Ilya Tourtidis won the Gerald Lampert Award for best first poetry
collection in 1993. This book does explore the nature of memory. It does
not engage very much with specific memories. There is a reticence about
details that leaves the reader frustrated, especially when the poems’
vivid titles lead one to expect vivid stories. Small dramas about people
denoted only by pronouns fill the book. Tourtidis does offer some
striking images: “The night / clicks away like castanets / and falls
in someone’s sackcloth,” he says at the opening of “The Inevitable
Darkness,” but the reference to “someone” is typical of his
vagueness. He shows more flexibility in line lengths than he did in his
first book, Mad Magellan’s Tale.