Border Crossings

Michael Williamson was Reference Librarian at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

Wollatt’s second collection — he is also an editor and high school English teacher — contains seventeen poems very loosely arranged around the theme of travelling, both to places and in memory. Most of the poems read like postcards or anecdotes, containing virtually no images, similes or metaphors. I suppose the sports poems are best:

Thinking of Big Terry

I remember a crew-cut kid in the forties

stopping pucks for the Windsor Spitfires.

(“King of Shutouts”)

Even these poems bog down in nostalgic melodramatic hyperbole and fail to capture much of anything. Mr. Wollatt’s line breaks are particularly clumsy and his consistent misuse of definite and indefinite articles in poetic lines augments the overall impression of someone who should be sending out witty little ditties to close friends — and no further.