Zhivago's Fire

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.

Andrew Wreggitt’s new book shows more formal ambition than his earlier
collections. He builds sequences and works at conveying emotions in more
indirect and complicated ways. The emotions are sometimes vaguely
articulated— the reader wonders what causes some of these black
moods—and some of the poems are weakened by long stretches of
perfunctory, rather flat language. However, prose poems like “John
Smith” and “Mud Lane” show a deepening of his work, while lined
poems like “Zhivago’s Fire” and “slippage” make a good use of
collage techniques. In the chilling ‘infrared,” which appears in a
strong sequence titled Science, a River, the pathologies of our society
are probed when the speaker realizes that someone in a high-rise
building is targeting his dog with the red laser beam of a rifle with a
telescopic sight.