One Poem: Poems Selected & new

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

In “Separation and Understanding,” Whiten writes “world it down on the page and it is enough,” and this kind of careless arrogance informs much of One Poem. The book is in four sections, dated 1969, 1979, 1979-83, and 1983. One may forgive — perhaps — the lame repetitions, clumsy rhymes, and posturings of the first section (“but now can I not write also of this”), but it is unsettling to see the same type of mistake ten years later. Indeed, some of the latter are so embarrassingly bad as to make one wonder whether English is the writer’s native tongue: “we shared God’s glory /with all men, sang the Amen verily sorry.” Things do not improve much in the third section: “you loved, /you loved, the world so right, your /dog, your father, your brother, your mother, /so warm and right and bright.” The final section opens with a seven-page poem chock-full of tortuous details of the protagonist’s life in leaden lines, although the last section, about Alden Nowlan, has a few good ones. Following some confused and simplistic versifying about mental illness and relationships, the book ends with a fragmented poem about childhood remembrances. There are some good things here — character sketches, poems about teaching, satiric verse about the poetry “scene” — but they are few. By generous count, of 78 poems, 24 are moderately to fairly good; 32 slight, sentimental, or mediocre; 10 frankly awful; and 12 devoid of sense. There is enough good material here for a chapbook, not 117 pages. This writer is careless to the point of ignorance in his craft, and arrogant in his expectation that such stuff be taken seriously.