Vintage 1999

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia. He is the
co-editor of It’s Still Winter, an online journal of contemporary
Canadian poetry and poetics, and Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Vintage 1999 contains the three prize winners in the League of Canadian
Poets National Poetry Contest (Susan M. Stenson for “When You Say
Infidelity,” Peter Richardson for “Dig,” and Brent MacLaine for
“Southward to Kissimmee), along with the 47 honorable mentions and the
winners of the Canadian Youth Poetry Contest. The book is a
disappointment. I wonder if every poet in the League is working on the
same poem, or if the rules required all poems submitted to read like
short stories in disguise, or if the judges simply threw away any
submission that was offbeat, experimental, or difficult.

Individually, some of these poems might hold a reader’s attention
through a first reading, but as a group the unrelieved
sameness—personal experience as ennobling, uplifting, or
educating—is smothering. Al Purdy could write this kind of poem and
make it stick, but Al Purdy is dead and this collection offers us no
heirs, only poor imitators.