Unfamiliar Weather

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.

Chris Hutchinson was one of the best writers in the Breathing Fire 2
anthology of younger poets. It is not surprising that this book is
memorable, which is not always the case with a first volume. He writes
on a variety of themes and his sense of the line and stanza is
excellent. His influences include John Newlove and John Thompson, so the
ironic distance in so many of the poems has a legitimate lineage. And
like Newlove and Thompson, ironic distance does not include emotional
intensity. The style seems fluent and even-toned—then suddenly he uses
a brilliant figure of speech, like the bass player who must lay his
instrument on its side “like an invalid lover” or the woman with
pneumonia who “breathes like a chandelier / in an earthquake / that
never ends.” The book might have been trimmed a little: two poems in
short stanzas (“Lost in Transit” and “October, November,
Toronto”) don’t carry their own weight, but Hutchinson is a poet to
take seriously.