Lost Gospels

A new book from former Halifax poet-laureate Lorri Neilsen Glenn, the poems in this collection are set in distinct Canadian places but most of them seem to be filled with the author’s own private reflections and memories. This is further suggested by a long list at the end of the book filled with individual poem dedications, obfuscated references to favourite songs and the like: Don McKay, Leonard Cohen, Allison and Ron and others by their first names. As a personal religion then, personal gospels, and songs of the past perhaps, the poems likely mean the world to the author and much to those mentioned unnamed within and named at the back. But readers might find them heavy with description that seems unclear immediately.

One section of the collection makes heavy reference to Simone Weil and might remind the reader of another Canadian poet heavily influenced by this author, Anne Carson. But Glenn isn’t setting herself up as an Atlantic Carson despite the heavy academic references—as I understand it, Glenn’s original trade. “It seems no book of Canadian poetry can be put to bed without an epigraph to tuck it in” says Canadian poetry critic Carmine Starnino, writing in the January 2010 issue of Poetry (Chicago), and it applies especially to this book. Starnino notes that the epigraph as a device in English poetry was virtually unknown before T.S. Eliot’s heavy-handed use of it. Glenn’s epigraphs are as numerous but more readable, if only for being in English rather than Latin and ancient Greek.

The best of these poems are the short, sparser and distilled lyric poems that stand on their own: “Dusk,” “Horse,” and “Turn.” These poems have clear images unencumbered by long strings of adjectives and verbs in the infinitive—the objects that bog down other poems in the collection. Glenn makes a number of references to other writers and sources in this collection but I find this energy would be better spent on the poems themselves. —Michael Goodfellow