Buying Space in the Lifeboat

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

Greenwood’s poems are nicely phrased meditations on life—primarily
on daily life. She has a sense of humor: reading in G.K. Chesterton that
“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese,” she
writes an amusing poem on the subject. The problem with her poems is not
badness but blandness. There is not much in her book that anyone would
argue with, but commonplace observations (usually ironic notations on
life) are rendered in an ordinary style not really distinguishable from
prose—a few exceptions include “October Poem,” with its
interesting sonic effects at the end, and “Swan Song,” with its
effective imagist convolutions. A number of the poems have appeared in
literary magazines, but this book seems premature.