Dementia Americana

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

Keith Maillard, a well-known novelist, writes carefully written, even
laborious poems on serious subjects. He still broods on the USA after
all his years in Canada, which makes him a kind of American patriot. He
harangues the reader on Vietnam and the Gulf War, mixing in his private
life in a way reminiscent of a much better poet, Robert Lowell.

The title poem, the most ambitious in the collection, is a long account
of the famous murder trial of Harry Thaw, who shot architect Stanford
White at Madison Square Garden in 1906. The trial and the lurid
background of the case (it involved a love triangle, flagellation, and
cocaine abuse) made it the O.J. Simpson scandal of its time.

Maillard has storytelling talents that might have turned this imbroglio
into a good novel, but his stanzas are pedestrian and much of the story
emerges maddeningly in the many pages of notes. Maillard’s skills have
not been well used in this collection.