Black Velvet Elvis.

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

J.D. Black is a talented writer, but this book, his first, has too much apprentice work. His use of rhyme and strict forms like the villanelle and rondeau manifests a dedication to craftsmanship, but the handling of rhyme is frequently awkward or obvious. The title poem is the best. We might expect only snickering camp from such a subject, but Black creates a superbly modulated and atmospheric meditation on a Quebec gas bar over which the picture of Elvis presides. The kitsch is in the subject but there is pathos in the depiction of a grubby world and the locals who inhabit it. The compassionate sonnets about a workman named Len—a failed tough guy—achieve the same mastery of tone. These poems give weight to a book in which the ironies are sometimes too frivolous.