Even at This Distance

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

This collection of poems is a collaboration between the fiction writer
W. P. Kinsella and his wife, Ann Knight. Unfortunately, neither of them
shows any talent for poetry, and the volume is remarkably self-regarding
and self-indulgent. There are prefaces by each author, rather arch
documents. The poems, signed “WPK” or “AK,” are arranged in a
“days of the week” pattern. Some of them have notes at the foot of
the page indicating where they were published. One poem, written in a
crude dialect and supposedly by one of Kinsella’s imaginary Native
characters, Silas Ermineskin, has a long note indicating that it was
commissioned so that it could be translated into Latin. Perhaps the
whole book should have been called Caveat Emptor. The poems are trivial
when they are not pretentious. The book ends with an “interactive
concordance,” a kind of simplified index with a fancy name. This work
has to be seen as a curiosity, an odd appendage to the career of one of
its authors, W.P. Kinsella.