Your Last Day on Earth

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.

This is the third book by an underrated Canadian poet. Hartsfield’s
lines are clear and superbly paced. She has favourite themes: flowers,
music, love—a list that might seem imperilled by sentimentality, but
this is a tough as well as tender sensibility. Her “Queen Anne’s
Lace” can survive comparison with the great work of the same title by
William Carlos Williams. Her flowers are real flowers, rooted in the
earth and not in poetic convention.

Hartsfield, also a fine pianist, writes skilfully about music and the
rigours of a musical vocation, and she has the ability to convey the
sensuous qualities of music-making. Poems about Glenn Gould are common
in Canadian poetry. Hartsfield’s “Brahms & Angelo’s Garage” is
one of the best, a juxtaposition of Gould playing Brahms and an auto
mechanic fixing a car: nuts and bolts of music, nuts and bolts of auto
repairs. Her book is a virtuoso performance.