Slag

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and a
poet. He is the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

Robinson’s book mixes genres in a fashion popular in Canadian writing.
It reads like a mixture of monologues, dialogues, and poems, moving
freely from prose to verse. Dorothy Livesay saw the “documentary” as
a particularly Canadian form, and Robinson has contributed a good
example of it.

The work deals with the conditions of industrial life in Canada,
telling the story of the mines and railroads needed to keep the standard
of living up. But mines and railroads depend on miners and railroad
workers, and Robinson is interested primarily in telling their stories.
The tough working conditions and the effects of poverty threaten to turn
workers themselves into slag, discarded byproducts of the system that
exploits them.

Mansel Robinson is a playwright, and his strength is in capturing
speech. His poetic style is not so compelling. This is nevertheless an
interesting effort, different from the easygoing and personal free verse
so popular with writers today.