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It used to be a good day when a book as fine as Gun Dogs was assigned to you for review. It still is, but jadedness now threatens to creep in. The poems in James Langer's debut are musically alert, with marvellous rhythmic and tonal variety. Such formal sophistication was once unicorn-rare in this country. Today there is barely enough time to keep up with new expressions of it. Canadian poets seem to have caught the habit of writing well.

It didn't happen by accident. A fully eloquent poetry has been available in this country since E.J. Pratt. But for decades Canadian critics and reviewers avoided this body of work out of the belief that literary style was for foreigners or phonies.

• Gun Dogs, by James Langer, Anansi, 64 pages, $18.95

No longer: Poetic form has become a hot-button issue thanks to a group of tyros who have made it impossible to talk about anything else. The upside is that it's an exciting time for serious readers of Canadian poetry, here and abroad. The downside is that an admirable book like Gun Dogs – which might have emerged as a triumph when fewer such books existed – trails the herd.

In fact, it's worse than a herd: a sub-genre. Gun Dogs is a prize example of what Newfoundland poet Patrick Warner calls “the School of Stacked Vowels and Clustered Consonants.” That means Langer has knack for finding words that, placed together, crackle and buzz. Read this collection with a pencil in hand, and you'll leave behind pages scored with marks beside every attractive sense-heightening description (“sandstone grit that girders the barrens'”), compressed evocation (“snow eddied, amassed, erased the trails”), and compound phrase (“fog-clot,” “murk-light,” “mud-thrum”).

“ Judged on technical merit alone, there doesn't seem much Langer can't ace”

Judged on technical merit alone, there doesn't seem much Langer can't ace (a fascinating sonnet called Half-full is constructed out of alternating end-rhymes of “half” and “full”). Indeed, the reason his translation of the first 64 lines of the Anglo-Saxon staple The Seafarer is so successful is that Langer himself writes with an Old English doggedness. He loves nothing better than to create a sense of linguistic abundance.

But even fans of this sort of thing will be forced to confront lines over-egged into noise and show-offness. Not to mention moments that, although ear-catching (“Loon's a loose cannon, booze-hound”), are nothing more than functional: They set up the next bit of wordplay. Too often, it's all effect, but no after effect; enhanced flavourings, but no lingering finish. For Langer, language that sounds good means well. The danger is we also see a poet, to use Clive James' words, “looking for spectacular ways to say not very much.”

For all the extra zing, Gun Dogs will leave you with the sense of a gobsmackingly gifted poet biting off a lot more than he can chew. That said, the late American poet-critic Thomas Disch had a useful test for gauging a collection's worth. Pretend you were editing the year's best, how many would tempt you? I'd say five: Home Suite, Gun Dogs, Gangrene, North of Boston and Chalk Outlines.

Enough to hold our attention? Absolutely. Enough to hold its own during a poetry boom time? Not quite – yet.

Carmine Starnino had just released his fourth book of poems, This Way Out. He lives in Montreal where he edits Maisonneuve magazine.