Correction Line

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

Cooley’s book has a superbly rich title. He explores his farm background in southern Saskatchewan (like Eli Mandel, he comes from the Estevan area), where the Dominion Land Survey created correction lines to compensate for the curvature of the Earth. This surplus land is often used for roads. Poems like “the heft of rocks” summon up the drudgeries of genuine farm work (much time is spent clearing stones) and also conjure impressions of the Natives who lived on the land before. John Newlove’s poems of Saskatchewan come to mind in reading this work. In a second sense of the line, Cooley explores his ancestry, creating a kind of verbal album of his relations. These are some of the most moving poems in the book. He is also intensely aware of the poetic line, which must, as serious poets know, be endlessly adjusted. Along with a powerful sense of the line, Cooley is a master of imagery. These are not examples of the predictable “prairie poems” that reviewers condescend to: no flat descriptions and easy anecdotes here. The reader might wish that the poems were compressed a little, and the ampersands become tiresome, but the contents of the book are as rich as the title.