Gentle Northern Summer

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

George Stanley writes accessible, rambling meditations on his past and
on daily experience. The poems are clear, often witty. Much of the time
they are too low-key, closer to diary entries than to poetry. They are
mostly in free verse, with a few poems in traditional forms. The poetry
often evokes place effectively: the San Francisco and San Jose of
Stanley’s past, his more recent knowledge of Prince George, Terrace,
and Vancouver. His themes are universal: desire, love of the physical
world, awareness of mortality, interest in ancestors and ancestral
places. Perhaps the most ambitious poem is “San Francisco’s Gone,”
an autobiographical narrative in 15 sections that deals with Stanley’s
personal and family history. It seems self-indulgent after a while, a
subject for a prose memoir. More interesting is “Terrace
Landscapes,” a long poem in a kind of drifting prose-poetry. It is
also autobiographical, but more rooted in place and sharp details of
daily life. Gentle Northern Summer gives a full picture of an appealing
sensibility and perhaps it should be approached as such a portrait; the
cumulative effect of the collection is stronger than the effect of any
individual poem.