All Manner of Misunderstanding

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.

Patrick Warner’s book is actually about all manner of understandings,
though the insights are intuitive and sometimes shadowy. In his sequence
called “Intimations,” much of the poetry is devoted to intimations
of immortality, or at least of transcendence. But his intuitions always
start from minute particulars: the styles of hands dipping into a holy
water font, or the behavior of a turf fire. The poet remembers being
asked by a nun in school what the soul looks like: he figures that the
correct or noncontroversial answer is “a white sheet,” but he has an
sudden vision of a carcass hanging in a butcher shop. The triggers for
his epiphanies are never conventional. In one poem he speaks of
“illegitimate keyholes to the divine,” which is more modest than
John Keats’s “charm’d magic casements,” but his peeps into the
divine are convincing, which means that they aren’t illegitimate at
all.

Warner’s poems are built on sturdy armatures of form. He can use the
sonnet without self-consciousness: his rhymes tend to be off-rhymes and
are unobtrusive. The tightness of form encourages compression and
weightiness in his utterances. This book is an unusually impressive
debut.