Fields of My Blood

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and a
poet. He is the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

John Asfour was born in Lebanon, where he experienced extreme violence.
At age 14, he was blinded by a grenade. At 22, he emigrated to Canada,
settling in Montreal. In this collection of poems, he looks at Montreal,
a city whose ordinary life he chronicles very well, and sombrely
describes his experiences of Beirut and Gaza, favoring grief over
grievance. His writing balances the horrors of war against the intensity
of personal relationships, especially family relationships. Some of the
poems are too diffuse or too flat, and the erotic is occasionally too
obvious a counterweight to the violence; many could have been better
edited. One of the best poems in the collection, “Chabanel Street,”
which deals with the lives of Montreal seamstresses who sew
undergarments in a factory, radiates compassion. Fields of My Blood
captures the multicultural texture of Canadian life.