Smoke/Screen: Poems on Cigarettes and Movies

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.

The title of this collection is appropriate; the poet’s perspective on
smoking is somewhat obscure. The poems jeer at the hypocrisies of
anti-smoking propaganda in a way that only a dedicated and touchy smoker
could appreciate, but some awareness of the bad faith of the arguments
can be glimpsed through the smog. The best poems deal with the glamour
that movies have invested in smoking, and Kerr has found interesting
examples of smoking in films. The style of the poems, however, is too
glib, too dependent on bare statements (often cast in parallel forms) in
the simplest words. The author needs to drop his off-the-cuff
manner—brush off the ashes—and work harder. The poems appear
effortless, but in the wrong way.