Flat Side

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.

Monty Reid, one of Canada’s best poets, has assembled a varied and
stimulating collection of poems. His style can accommodate humor and
pathos, the mundane and the extraordinary. The title work, an unusual
love poem, talks about the flattening of the body from persistently
sleeping on the same side; this apparently grotesque reflection turns
into a powerful tribute to the person the speaker sleeps with. A
brilliant elegy for the Alberta poet Jon Whyte uses the Jurassic shale
as a metaphor for what can be saved and what can be lost. Here and there
the muse seems to have been marking time, as in “Phone Lessons” and
“Migration of the Zucchini,” poems that fail to deliver enough, but
the book contains a brilliant account of the Third World (“La
Gunilla”) and a moving elegy for a father conveyed through metaphors
drawn from the sport of curling. The sombre “Near the Beisecker
Bio-Medical Waste Incinerator” evokes the fragility of the human body.
Flat Side is the work of a mature poet at the height of his powers.