Notes on Drowning

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.

Rob McLennan (who calls himself rob mclennan) has lots of attitudes and
a rather limited style for expressing them. He seems to be in the Black
Romantic mode defined by Leonard Cohen: “it is 4am / I sit in a
strange womans [sic] apartment,” one poem begins. Ampersands and odd
spellings are part of his style. In “dreaming elizabeth,” he
describes a car backing up on a one-way street and complains that he has
never understood that “one-way” means direction of movement rather
than pointing the nose of the car in the right direction. These poems
have an avant-garde look but they are not actually moving forward. One
of mclennan’s books was inspired by an almost forgotten American poet,
Richard Brautigan, and some of Brautigan’s fey tone can be found in
these self-conscious poems. The best poems are in the “Hiroshima”
sequence: for once the poet turns outward instead of inward.