Helsinki Drift

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.

Canadian poets love to write travel poems—Earle Birney and Al Purdy
come to mind. Even P.K. Page described Canadians as “permanent
tourists.” On the one hand, the form can be brilliant, full of empathy
and cosmopolitan insight. On the other hand, travel poems are sometimes
condescending in tone or read like excerpts from a travel diary.

Douglas Burnet Smith’s book is a mature and witty collection. One of
the best poems is “Playing Scrabble with Tristan Tzara at the Trois
Maillets,” which stages an imaginary match with the long-dead founder
of Dada. Tzara would approve. Other poems evoke Keats, the Lake Country,
and Tennyson. Smith’s visit to Keats’s house in Hampstead, England,
is a fine meditation on the poet and his mortal illness, powerful in
understatement and delicate in imagery.

Perhaps the weakest poem in the book is “Sophia” (set in Istanbul),
which is indeed a set of travel notes. But a long love poem,
“Alesia,” is brilliant throughout, beautifully paced and modulated.
The frequent use of the second person in the book is probably meant to
be self-effacing but it sometimes creates an air of detachment. But then
the permanent tourist is detached by the outsider’s perspective. This
is a strong collection.