Earth prime

Winner of the 1995 Writers Guild of Alberta Award for Poetry Bert Almon's poems are centred in local, apparently unremarkable moments which are addressed with such a fine, ironic eye that they suddenly yield their innate comedy, tragedy, paradox, tenderness. "Poetry," he has said, "is a message slipped under the door/ You don't even have to read it/ It wants to tell you about danger/ life and death and good parties." In this, his seventh collection, Almon's locales range from the Texas of his youth to the physiotherapist's office near his present home in Western Canada, through concert halls in London and amphitheatres in Greece.