Evergreen: Six New Poets

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.

Evergreen: Six New Poets is meant to be a snapshot of poetry as it is
being written by the current generation. The sample is rather small. Two
of the writers, Susan Emslie and Andy Weaver, are serious artists who
will repay close attention; they display intelligence, wit, formal
ingenuity, and skill with words. One of the other poets, Jon Paul
Fiorentino, says that immediacy is overrated, an observation that he and
some of the other writers should have painted on their walls. The
self-absorption of much of this poetry is tedious: writing “I” as
“i” doesn’t suffice to create poetry. Ryan Fitzpatrick’s desire
to write about Ogden, Alberta, keeps him out of the pit of solipsism,
though his heaping up of details is only a start. This anthology isn’t
truly representative of the best poetry being written by younger poets
today.