I Mention the Garden for Clarity

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

Vivian Marple’s first book of verse shows as much variety as a
botanical garden; there are prose-poems, poems in free verse, poems
written as blocks of lines with or without punctuation. As the book’s
title implies, Marple uses the metaphor of the garden to convey her
meanings. The best poems are those that come closest to prose; they have
a weight that many of the poems in lines do not. A number of poems,
however, should not stand alone, the theme and treatment being too minor
(the book would have been much stronger if about a quarter of the poems
had been cut). Marple writes in an interesting way about family,
especially about a mother who died young and a grandmother with a tough
personality, but the narratives about family and a lover don’t cohere
sufficiently. There is promise here, and sometimes achievement, but the
collection as a whole is less than the sum of its parts. The garden
might have been weeded a little more.