The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh

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.

At his best in The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhh, Rob McLennan achieves a
constrained lyricism, a hesitant mulling over of experience in short
phrases. In that collection, his most successful works are the prose
pieces about his mother (“last leaves I”) and the elegies for Dennis
Tourbin called “confectionery airs.” The emotions expressed can be
subtle, though they are sometimes simply vague or inhibited. In such
cases the style is less constrained than choked. He is equally fond of
making pop-culture references and references to his being a poet. Pop
culture almost never returns such compliments by recognizing poets.

Manitoba Highway Map is a kind of poetic diary of a cross-Canada
reading tour with four other poets. The entries are brief jottings
rather than accomplished poems. His excitement with the prairie
landscape comes through but not in original terms.

In Bagne, or, Criteria for Heaven, McLennan builds his book on
name-dropping: the title of each poem is a last line from the poem of
another writer, whose name is introduced with “fr,” an abbreviation
meaning for “for” and “from.” The book is meant to explore the
notion of the millennium by presenting the year 2000 as a kind of
interspace between the end of the 20th century and the start of the new
millennium, which purists believe started in 2001. The millennium
already seems ancient history. He does not succeed in creating a public
poetry from his concerns and the name-dropping becomes an annoyance.
Bagne has a cautious blurb from John Newlove: “rob mclennan may do
some very fine things that will surprise us all.” This may indeed be
true, but so far there are few surprises and a lot of mannerisms. A
little less self-consciousness would make the poetry more generous in
its emotions and insights.