An ABC of Belly Work

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.

Peter Richardson is a poet who has arrived in midlife with a wealth of
experiences and a network of family relationships to explore. His work
is usually personal but not narcissistic—most readers could empathize
with his point of view even if they aren’t in middle age themselves.
He has a strong sense of humour, as in his poem about being, as he puts
it, lopsided—thanks to a groin injury in an embarrassing place.

He varies the subject matter of his collection by writing about
history, natural history (coelecanths and damselflies), and his work as
an airport worker at Dorval, where he laboured for 28 years. “Belly
work” is the job of loading cargo onto planes. The formal diversity of
his book is delightful in an age in which so many poems look the same;
Richardson uses many stanza forms, and he is not fixed on one line
length. It is a pleasure to encounter a mature mind with the resources
to turn its wisdom into poetry.