Slow-Moving Target

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.

Sue Wheeler’s first book, Solstice on the Anacortes Ferry (1995), won
the Kalamalka Award and was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award and
the Gerald Lampert Award. This second book does not disappoint. Her work
ranges over a wide variety of subjects—unwrapping the “box of the
fifties” (her childhood in Texas), life on a Gulf Island, travel. Her
tone tends to be elegiac. She makes some very fine leaps of association
in these poems. The style is plain but the movements of the poet’s
imagination sometimes take the breath away, as in “Nonsense,” in
which a husband’s heart attack is indelibly associated with cleaning
fish: “nothing / made sense, my knife / shooting wet stars all over
the cabin.” She makes a fine use of metaphors drawn from science,
astronomy, evolution. Typical of her talent for surprise is her
comparison of an eclipse to an alignment by a cosmic chiropractor.