When the Devil Calls

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

Roger Bell’s collection has some strong poems. His “If Icarus had
been a woman” is a wonderful reworking of the old myth, and some of
the poems about the American south give a vivid sense of place. His
rather sentimental family poems at the end of the book, however, spoil
the overall impression, and he might have left out an old-fashioned
piece of sexism like “Why I broke up with her (a carefully thought-out
list),” a poem which makes fun, but not enough fun, of its speaker.
Bell shows equal ability with brief lyrical poems and narratives in
sequences. He can write a powerful and compressed work about genocide in
Rwanda and two pages later make the reader laugh about a jealous man in
Italy who glued his wife’s hands to her lover’s penis. Roger Bell is
a good poet. All his book needed was more judicious editing.