The Ecstasy of Skeptics

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
the author of Calling Texas and Earth Prime.

Heighton has talent, but this is not a powerful collection of poems. The
style is wordy and the effects muffled. Familiar poetic machinery, like
imagery of gardens, the sea, or the light from distant stars, is brought
on stage but there is little action. The heart of the book is a long
sequence called “A.D.” in which the poet tries to explore the
Apollonian and Dionysian poles of experience, using contemporary
theories about the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Heighton
pitches high but he can’t throw: his Dionysian poems are not very
intense and his Apollonian ones (like the weak academic satire
“Annotation of a Fragment”) fail to show much intellectual depth. He
is most interesting when he is least pretentious, as in “Eating the
Worm,” a poem that uses precise imagery in a compelling framework of
incantation. The “worm” is the insect at the bottom of a jug of
mescal, and the act of drinking the mescal and eating the worm is an
excellent metaphor for grief. By the end of the book, the reader is
likely to feel that Heighton would be a better poet if his straining for
profundity were not so self-conscious. This collection arouses more
skepticism than ecstasy.