The Moment Coming

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.

Margaret Christakos has written some fine poetry in the past, but this
collection mixes sentimental poems about her family with mechanical and
unconvincing experiments. Most readers will be put off by the three
pages of forced anagrams that precede the title page. The opening
sequence deals with growing up in Sudbury but fails to explore the
special qualities of the city, which is, after all, a distinctive
industrial site. There are some vivid poems about childbirth, but for
the most part Christakos takes rather uninteresting poems about daily
life and rearranges them in various ways. Most often the rearrangement
involves making new texts based on every second, third, fourth, fifth,
or sixth word. The results of this arbitrary procedure are usually
gibberish. The last few poems explore the possibilities of recasting
heterosexual love in androgynous terms, as a means of creating an ampler
conception of feeling; these poems are the most successful in the book.
A recurring theme of the collection is a woman examining her own
backside with a mirror: the image is perhaps more apt than intended.