From an Argument I've Taken with Me

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.

Jim Roberts presents his poems as a series of soliloquisms the reader is
allowed to overhear. The poems, presented in three sections, are
interestingly juxtaposed (rather akin to a travel diary)—those set in
faraway places against those set in Canada. Interspersed among the poems
are brief, personal statements in haiku form, having an aphoristic
implication.

Roberts sculpts his poems (always admirably titled) to specific
occasions, variously sarcastic, reflective, and intensely personal (as
the two poems on his father attest). He favors short, staccatolike lines
and has a photographic eye for detail.

The book’s cover art, also by the author, is to be particularly
commended. It seems to express Roberts’s own “wrought
contraction.”