Heartwood

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

Gerald Hill’s first collection contains 39 poems that are mostly episodic vignettes: here an anecdote, there is place, there a feeling, here an observation with no discernible point of view. In the publisher’s blurb that accompanies the book, Mr. Hill quotes “someone” who said that a poem “is a record of a mind moving”; he also says that he tries to “realize what seems to be the poem’s impulse.” This is pretty wishy-washy aesthetic, because a poem may move all right — but where and why? And it may be fuelled by an impulse (heaven knows most poems are fuelled by something), but namely is it enough to create a poem that communicates something to the reader which transcends literal or narrative statement. And this is unfortunately the predicament of this collection: most of the poems are caught between narrative literalness and clumsy, inappropriate imagery that can’t carry the story. Even in a poem as obvious as “Labour Day, Unemployed,” Mr. Hill takes a potentially volatile situation where a friend of his little sister’s has become a bureaucrat who scrutinizes his resumé:

The poem is dragged kicking and screaming into lizard imagery, of all things, and the whole point is lost. This occurs time and time again in this collection. Mr. Hill can turn a phrase and has some nice lines here and there, but, overall, the collection does not ring true and doesn’t say very much. Much movement and no direction: resulting in poetry that needs much reworking.