The Taste of Water.

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

Frank Ledwell is a much-honoured Prince Edward Island writer, and his province’s second poet laureate. His work is pleasant, well-written, and rather ordinary in style. He tends to be nostalgic and parochial. The volume contains some good poems, like “The Red Fox,” with close observation of the animal and its survival skills. A reader will get a good sense of the activities (blueberry picking, quilting, collecting sap from sugar maples, farming) and geography (red dirt roads, the encompassing sea) of P.E.I.

Regionalism need not be limiting, but Ledwell rarely achieves the universal through the local, and his tired metaphors (“I am no more than a droplet in the stream of life”) are part of the problem. Ledwell needs a little of the cantankerous spirit and gnarled style of his fellow Islander, Milton Acorn. This is not really a book for export.