Branch Lines

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

Kim Maltman’s second collection is being marketed by Saskatoon’s Thistledown Press as a comprehensive selection of his oeuvre until now — a total of 26 poems of varying length. The book is nicely designed on stiff, grey (dustlike?) paper with four mediocre pencil drawings which do complement the text by disappearing out of sight and memory. A major problem with this book is the layout of the poems on the pages: the poems look dense and inaccessible — perhaps due to the peculiar line breaks. Some lines are far too long and then break clumsily, while others come to a screeching halt. The form of the poetry on the page does little to add to the content because the book, though attractive enough, is too difficult to read. And the poetry could have benefitted from fluid form because it is very uneven, with many over-used, lifeless images and careless diction: “Then you stop and it’s like / a switch had been flicked off.” A sense of dust and despair of “dirty thirties” prairie life does emerge, but it is difficult to comprehend what the poet wants us, the readers, to think or feel about it. The poems lack focus or point of view. The prose poems bog down by their careless use of the second person singular (or is it plural?) point of view: who is the “you,” the reader or the poet? This collection could have used a good editor.