Weighted Light

Chris Knight is copy editor of the National Post in Toronto.

This first book by Allan Briesmaster is a rather uneven effort. Some of
the 48 poems, such as “Onion Brunch” and “By Public Transit,”
unfold as pedestrian retellings of events, opting for easy adjectives
and failing to expand to a larger message or meaning.

Others do indeed take flight. In “Head Office Window,” a Saturday
spent working in a deserted office building becomes a meditation on the
scales embodied in our cities: human, superhuman (the “dead-shiny
cliffs, their slabs and grilles and racks” of skyscrapers), and
subhuman (the particles that “surge in transformers, cable, CRTs /
networking floor to floor”). Sprinkled throughout the book are haikus,
some of them both funny and timely, for instance: “Online at last, my
/ e-mail running, I emit / ... an emoticon.”

Of particular interest are the brief notes and sources at the book’s
end. Briesmaster is not shy about telling the reader what works inspired
him, and he also provides brief, chatty notes about several individual
poems as well as some of his larger themes. For someone unfamiliar with
the poet (as I was), this dialogue outside the boundaries of the verse
is a thought-provoking addition to the work.