Rough Skin

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

In this first collection of poems by Maureen Hynes, the quality is
consistently high. Hynes’s work is rooted in the personal (friends,
lovers, a dying mother, and others), but it looks outward enough not to
be claustrophobic. She reveals a strong social conscience and can evoke
the grit of city life like Margaret Avison. She is also very good at
writing about travel—Mexico, China, Australia, Thailand, and Nepal
come alive in her poems. The prose techniques used in several poems,
including “The Spare Room” (a long elegy that ends the book),
suggest that she is not limited to the straightforward free-verse poem
so common today. A first book this good makes one wonder what will come
next.