Human Gardens

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of education at the University of
Prince Edward Island and honorary chief of the Mi’kmaq of Prince
Edward Island.

Versatility is the hallmark of this collection of poems by the late
Robert Clayton Casto. We are presented with a late–20th-century
Horatian ode (“The Anthology”), a freewheeling fantasia (“The
Amazing Home Movies”), a scrambled dramatic monologue (“The
Garlands”), a wistful reflection (“The Classroom”), a pastoral
(“The Dance of Death of Brother Wig”); an anatomy of a murder
mystery ( “Hit Tunes of the Forties”); and several versions of the
elegy (as in “The Question of Cleopas”).

Casto is a craftsman, a master of the rhetoric of the run-on sentence,
the offbeat enjambment. He is a master of concentration, as well, often
crowding his lines with detail. While his poetic vision is fundamentally
bleak (there are hints of Swiftian savagery in some of his satire), he
tempers that vision with a deep-seated compassion. Casto deserves to be
much more widely known.