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A Ghost in Waterloo Station
by Bert Almon
The signature publication of a well-known poet at the top of his game
Bert Almon's poems are exquisitely made, the fluidity of his lines, the subtlety of his eye, never ceases to leave us with a shimmering sense of the world. His descriptive and luminous perceptions engage us on every page. A Ghost in Waterloo Station is impeccably scored, shot through with intelligence, wit and a generosity of spirit. The book lives in that intersection between vertical artistry and horizontal breadth. What it sees between those crosshairs is a gift to us all.
-Don Domanski, author of Parish of the Physic Moon
The poems in A Ghost in Waterloo Station take the everyday world as their point of departure, but the place of arrival "is never the shore you started from." Vivid invocations and meditations on childhood, art, and travel bring together places and people as likeable and unexpected as the wry poetic sensibility recommending them to our attention. Greece is "a country where clarity / is inescapable unless it forces your lids shut." Swallows enter their nests "high on the white stacked walls" at Indian Lodge "as if the ghost/ of a remorseful pickpocket/ were slipping a wallet/ back where it come from."
There is much humour here, and warmth, combined with an awareness of loss and the weight of history--all delivered in a voice that is distinctive in its combination of narrative, and wry psychological observation:
My mother came ashore at the hospital
but I was reluctant to make my own landing,
so from her womb I was tardily ripped.
She liked to show me the dark scar when she was angry-
that wasn't fun like hearing about the boat ride.
The Rh factor made the doctors anticipate
a blue baby, but I was a squalling red
and I've declined to be blue ever since.
From "Hesitation Before Birth"
Bert Almon is the author of eight previous collections of poetry, including
Earth Prime which won the 1995 Writer's Guild of Alberta Award for Poetry. He has been a finalist for the
Times Literary Supplement / Blackwell's Poetry Competition, and in 1993 was a Poetry Fellow at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland. He has taught modern literature and creative writing at the University of Alberta since 1968 and at least thirty of his former students have gone on to publish their own collections of poetry (more than fifty books).
