Lords of Shouting

Donalee Moulton-Barrett was a writer and editor in Halifax.

Joseph Sherman’s poetry, in Lords of Shouting, is of two kinds: the emotional and the intellectual — the successful and the unsuccessful, respectively.

When Sherman writes about the pleasurable pain and the confusion that is adolescence, his poetry is clear, open, penetrating, and thoroughly enjoyable. In “Ponteau: A Summer,” for example, Sherman introduces us to Martin, his friends, his “love,” his dreams, his desires, and gives us lines like these: “I can’t hate her / I can’t learn to hate her — / — never considering / that the incessant wishing her dead / gripping his heart like a meat hook / is the same thing / or worse.”

Much of the poetry at the opening of Lords of Shouting is of this type, and it’s a joy to read. As the book progresses, however, the poetry becomes intellectualized, academic, stuffy, and borders on the pompous. It is deliberately difficult and unnecessarily wordy. Try struggling through this: “Bowldering the close, a fust of sepulchres / sunken and pitted with incantata obscured.”

There is meaning behind the words but how many readers are going to take the time to discover it? More importantly, should they have to?

Sherman assumes that his readers want complicated scholarly treatises just as some people want expensive art books for their coffee table. They impress company but they do not impress readers. Lords of Shouting is no (yawn) exception.