Selected Poems Book

I read this collection on the basis of a poem I read upon open the book to a random page...
I said
Mr. Schafer
did you get up to see the comet:

and
he said
Oh no
let it go by, I don't care:
- Dominion (pg. 43)

This poem contains the humour of a poet who once referred to himself as a "drab pot" ("top bard" backwards). Otherwise, the poem is less remarkable in the collection, belonging to the free form poems that seem to get lost among the lengthier poems that are more formally inclined - most notably, the selection from TAPE FOR THE TURN OF THE CENTURY...
today I
decided to write
a long
thin
poem

employing certain
classical considerations:
this
part of the poem is called the pro-
logue: it has to do with
the business of
getting started:

first the
Must
must be acknowledged...
- (pg. 28)

Another long poem of note, the selection from GLARE, is more characteristic of the poet's later style...
I see the eye-level silver shine of
the axe blade the big neighbour carried

at our house at dawn, and I see the
child carried off in arms to the woods,

see the sapling split and the child
passed through and the tree bound

back...
- (pg. 95)

I must denounce, in the same poem, the poet's misogyny...
...but I love women
so much, even the way you can talk

them into duplicity, I mean their
melting spirituality, like the

rose-warmth of nursing, just moves
me so much, I feel like saying,

please excise me, but are you sure
it would be all right if I mounted

you...
- (pg. 98)

Overall, these longer poems failed to impress me, but there were always a few lines that grabbed my attention and redeemed the otherwise long-winded and excessive rhapsodizing on the poet's part...
I'm alone too much: get
to think
other people
aren't people
- Tape for the Turn of the Year (pg. 37)

these self-monitorings create problems
where there are none: they fill

inanition with misery, when if you
can look about you and do things,

inanition goes away and so does the
misery...
- Glare (pg. 101)

I prefer the earlier, shorter poems. These poems are unencumbered by the poet's ambition, his preoccupation with the profound (or trying to sound profound). Ironically, the simplicity of these poems come across to me as being more profound than the longer poems. At their best, they are like Zen Koans...
I found a
weed
that had a

mirror in it
and that
mirror

looked in at
a mirror
in

me that
had a
weed in it
- Reflective (pg. 24)