This Place

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

Much of Baltensperger’s first book is concerned with man’s relationship to nature and the cosmos, often much more the subject matter of coastal and prairie poets. This expansive vision, potentially very exciting, is unfortunately seldom fully realized.

Baltensperger seems incapable of writing a line longer than five or six words: consequently, the poetry has a choppy, arrhythmic quality. Perhaps to compensate, the language becomes inflated, and phrases such as “ancestral fears,” “peripheral vicissitudes,” and “thallogenic nights” are all too common.

Such language is usually not given necessary substance through concrete detail, and the reader is left with poetry both vague and unsatisfying. Isolated poems, such as those written about Baltensperger’s family, do work because they deal more directly with the fusion of observable details and the feelings they evoke. Unfortunately, successful poems are the exception in this book, and the very crude black-and-white illustrations cannot redeem it.