Beautiful Sadness

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.

Lesley Choyce has published 46 books, a number of them poetry, so we can
expect at least a fair level of competence. That is as far as it goes in
this mediocre collection. The writing is never exciting, merely adequate
to convey ordinary experience. There are domestic poems, bits of social
comment, tributes to other writers, an inept updating of Allen
Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and poems about being a writer. The lines are
broken at natural places but have no real tension to them, and the
adjectives proliferate. Almost anything can become a poem for Choyce,
but most of the poems have no inner necessity. A rare exception is
“Newfoundland Kitchen,” which evokes the intensity of an accordion
player in a deeply empathetic way.