Echolocation

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.

Carole Chambers writes from Hornby Island in the Georgia Strait, but her
work encompasses other places, seen or imagined. Her work is
ecologically sound and she deplores the deplorable, like Slobodan
Milosevic, pollution, and clear-cutting the forests. While many will
share her attitudes, her style is bland, using low-pressure free-verse
lines filled with ordinary adjectival descriptions. A long poem called
“The Virgins of Mexico” is one that an editor should have cut. It is
circumstantial and didactic. Her best poem is surely “Ulva,” which
celebrates mermaids and seaweed and exotic marine terminology in a
sensuous combination that charms without being fey. Prose passages are
effectively interspersed with the usual short free-verse passages. This
poet needs to give more attention to formal invention. Her book is not
bad, but it is merely run of the mill in the original sense: fabric
produced by a textile mill but not sorted for quality.