The Compass

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

Stephen Morrissey’s poems are in a confessional mode. We learn much
about the family in which he grew up, his divorce, his regenerative love
affair. The style is prosaic, alternately flat and strident, and fails
to draw us into his experiences; most of the poems could be cut by at
least a third. In the family poems, which are perhaps the most
interesting, Morrissey is not so self-absorbed. The poems about his
unhappy marriage (and unhappy divorce) are so one-sided that the reader
would like rebuttal from the ex-wife, whose alleged 200 personalities
might make her interesting. The love poems that constitute the last
section are doubtless sincere, but their rhetoric and the constant
claims to transforming experience become wearing. “Psyche’s
Daughter” is the best of them; it has strong images and an aura of
myth. Generally the author is not very convincing when he writes about
sex, a subject of universal interest but one that is difficult to
represent without clichés. He ends his book with three rather mawkish
prayers. The reader notes with some apprehension that this is the first
book in a series.