River Suite

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

Joe Blades shows a genuine lyric gift in some of these poems, like
“Path of a Harvest Moon” and “Chamcook.” Often he relies on raw
anger and discontent without much subtletly, particularly in his attack
on the health-care system in “The Test,” a poem in which the speaker
is humiliated when he takes an HIV test. The book is written in short
lines that become monotonously too easily, and Blades is too preoccupied
with being a poet. One of the book’s interesting dimensions is its
evocation of life along the Saint John River in New Brunswick; the world
is one that will remind readers of David Adams Richards’s Miramichi
Valley. Blades’s book would have been stronger had it been shorter.