The Great Light Cage: Collected and New Poems

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of education at the University of
Prince Edward Island and an honorary chief of the Mi’kmaq of Prince
Edward Island.

The Great Light Cage brings together new poems by Robert Flanagan and
selections from earlier collections (Body, 1970; Incision, 1972;
Gravity, 1978; On the Ground, 1990). Connoisseurs of pure language
poetry will delight in his apt and witty phrases, but the general reader
may respond with puzzlement at best and frustration at worst.
Flanagan’s typical poem is an enjambed sequence of telegrammatic
statements. Each poem is characteristically short-lived, succinct, and
self-contained. There is something mannered about the repeated use of
this method; most readers will look for more variety in rhetoric.
Flanagan’s linguistic invention is brilliant, but the ambiguity and/or
indeterminacy of much of the content of his poems will leave the general
reader wondering what they are really all about.