The Fragments

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Stavros Tsimicalis’s Greek ancestry and background permeates his third
book of poetry, the first wholly in English. It’s an entertaining mix
of narrative and lyric poetry, in which the speakers wander between a
Greek landscape full of myth and history and Canadian settings covered
with the detritus of industrial civilization.

The poems range from lyric evocations of classical myth and legend to
little narratives of the poet’s own life. “Canto 65” presents a
moment of terrible insight for Ulysses, neatly named “Dysseus.” “A
Hellene in a Boreal Land Gives Thought to 529 AD” is one of a number
of poems about being Greek in Canada, or being a Canadian who returns to
a Greece that is no longer his.

Stylistically, the poems run the gamut from long-lined travelogues and
meditations on landscape and family to lovely little imagist poems. The
collection as a whole offers fresh insight into the kinds of psychic
baggage that all immigrants carry into their new lives.