Prosody at the Cafe du Coin

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

Although the title of this collection might lead a reader to expect a
book of highly traditional poems, Jeff Bien is closer to the poets who
appear on MuchMusic than to keepers of the metrical faith. He is in the
tradition of Leonard Cohen, with poems that combine intense eroticism
with a kind of Beat religiosity. Many of them are addressed to an
undefined “you,” and deal with extreme states such as madness or
salvation. In “Poetics,” the speaker tells a friend, “Learn well
the vows of a priest / and sing like a chained sky.” Elsewhere poetry
is described as “that great syphilitic whore.”

Bien’s prosody is minimal, with an emphasis on short lines, easy
syntax, and parallelism. His poems are not without merit, but there is
an air of déjа vu about them.