Doubt's Boots

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 text of this long poem doesn’t really live up to the high
ambitions (not to say pretensions) of the author’s preface, which
suggests that the reader will enter a shifting, self-remaking text where
meaning slips and regains its balance only to slip again. The poem is a
little like Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, a collage of personal
memories and learning. We jump around from the narrator’s farming
experiences to chit-chat on the streets of Banff, with many asides on
the nature of art. The verbal texture is not very interesting—the
sense of the line is weak—and unlike Pound, Noble doesn’t have a
body of extraordinary experience to draw on.