Singing Bone

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.

Katharine Bitney does not rely on the circumstances of her life to
provide the subject matter of her poetry. She is interested in the
archetypal: realms of myth, religious vision, and the dream.

Part 1 of this carefully structured book deals with dreams and is
probably the best section. The poems in Part 2, Bone Flute, explore the
Adam and Eve story (and hence male–female relationships) and the
relationship between music and silence (silence makes music possible).
The Adam and Eve poems are a little contrived, suggesting Ted Hughes’s
Crow and the parables of Anne Szumigalski. Part 3, Risk, explores
adventurous states of mind, as the title implies.

The last section, Around the Women’s Fire, is a little too
programmatic; the poems seem worked up from books on myth and women’s
rituals. The long poem “Everything I Knew” suffers from a tentative
tone. A writer exploring the archetypal can’t afford rhetorical
questions. Bitney’s vision often becomes airborne, but it doesn’t
yet master the heavens.