Skaldance

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.

Gary Geddes adapts his title from the Old Norse term, “skald,” for a
poet attached to the court of a chieftain. Geddes’s ancestry goes back
to grandparents from the Orkneys, the Scottish islands which were Norse
until 1468. By proclaiming himself a skald, or at least a creator of
skald dances, Geddes asserts his right to be a chronicler of Orkney
life, and narratives dominate the work. He keeps to a high technical
standard, employing stanza forms very skilfully, along with prose poems.
The persistent attempts to write from the point of women are not very
successful, especially when he tries to imagine sex from a female point
of view. The last work in the collection, “The Zeno Transplant,” is
the high point. Geddes juxtaposes a modern story of a marriage with a
yarn about one Antonio Zen of Genoa, who supposedly travelled as Henry
St. Clair, Earl of Orkney, to what is now Nova Scotia in 1398. The
juxtapositions don’t always work, but the attempt is interesting.
Geddes has always been interested in voyages, his own and ones from
history, and this is an ambitious work.