Deep North

Bob Lincoln is Director of Acquisitions at the University of Manitoba
Libraries.

The poems in Deep North are clearly written, true to everyday life, and mildly entertaining, and they raise some major issues. However, they are almost all forgettable. Bert Almon is at his best when he foregoes the easy, detached stance of a dispassionate observer and gets involved — as in “Deep North” or “Acadian Fields.” In these two poems there is substantial conflict and concern at work. A sense of urgency emerges from these poems that is noticeably absent elsewhere. In “The Intrusions,” Almon describes a woman with a pathological fear of men who remind her of ambulance attendants. Working through an image of a scissors grinder and ending with a description of an unopened packet of sewing needles, the poem works on several levels of meaning. One point is to remind us of the woman’s unexamined life and her sharp pain that is hidden from view. We are not told this directly, but we observe it as the poem unfolds.

The other poems in Almon’s fifth collection are only partly satisfying. They raise issues in a detached, prossaic way, and they only begin to shape and examine the ideas that caused them to be written. They are consistent with Almon’s own words — “Poetry is not breaking and entering /It is a message slipped under the door.” Even so, one wonders what kind of person it was who slipped it, and what the whole story really was.