Moving through Deep Snow

Bill Brydon was a librarian/journalist in Toronto.

Don Polson’s sixth book is a modestly ambitious collection of free-verse “one-pagers” which works through a broad network of ideas but generates little interest in any area. The 63 poems are grouped thematically into four collections, beginning with a short segment about fatherhood, with poems dedicated to the author’s sons. The second collection presents the poet’s world-view and reflects generally on the past, both historical and personal. Of these poems, the best are those that work through meaningful personal memories, and the weakest are those that are “merely” outward-looking, treating such overworked themes as the gap between rhetoric and reality in the Third World (p.13).

A third group of poems, called “In the Clear Eye of Our Neighbor,” busies itself with portraying the socially disadvantaged: punks, prostitutes, alcoholics, the mentally infirm — in a word, the dregs. This collection may result, at least partly, from a desire to experiment with the dramatic monologue; I’ve often noticed that authors of monologues seem drawn to aberrant minds. To me, this is the most troublesome part of the book. To write a good monologue, it’s best to, like Browning, try to confuse the reader by letting the subject make the best possible case for himself. Polson’s monologues are mechanical demonstrations of psychological deficiency. Boys thoughtlessly beat up their girls, and girls foolishly allow themselves to be beaten, and behind it all the poet is thinking nothing more than what the well-informed commonly think. The poems are inhibited by a middle-class distaste for the problems of “others.” The book concludes with a series of nature poems, which are agnostic celebrations of life in the country.

Polson has mastered the trick of writing free-verse that is neither choppy nor prosaic. His sound is restrained and controlled, lacking in distinctive features. His rhythms are unobtrusive and unvaried. His language is, at times, admirably subtle, but rarely vivid. All in all, nothing more than a professional collection.