American Standard and Other Poems

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.

Sherman’s publisher says that he regards this collection as a return
to “life’s miscellany” after his cycle of poems about the martyred
Raoul Wallenberg. The miscellaneous quality of the collection is
apparent. Sherman has poems about mythology (an interesting one on the
love of the cyclops Polyphemous for a Thracian woman), the Holocaust,
his father, his ambivalence toward America, paintings by Manet: the
variety is considerable. The best poems are the ones commemorating his
late father, but there is much more to admire in this book. The poems on
the Holocaust are powerful because they are not distorted by rhetoric.
Sherman understands the power that resides in restraint. Feeling always
seems at the centre of the writing. Perhaps Sherman does not always turn
the anecdote or observation into art, but his miscellany has fine
moments.