Criminal Mountains

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 three sections at the core of John O’Neill’s book are strong,
filled with poems about bear attacks, glaciers, and, for comic relief, a
portrait of a Goth girl whose backpack looks like a small black coffin.
One poem in this core, “On Top,” is a disastrous lapse in tone, with
its crude view of how men and women feel about mountains expressed in
crude terms. The bear attack poems, with their strong use of irregular
stanzas to organize vivid scenes of terror, are the high point of the
book.

The sections that flank the inner three are not so interesting. The
“Patricia Poems” that open the book deal with time the narrator
spends in the company of a woman he admires and hopes, rather
mournfully, will admire him. Unrequited love’s a bore, as Rodgers and
Hart said in the song—at least unless the poet is Petrarch or Sidney.

The last section, mourning the poet’s mother, has multiple problems
of taste and tone, with mawkish crudity posing as frankness. The effect
is sentimental in a grotesque way, surprising from a poet as talented as
O’Neill.