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Untitled Child, by Nancy Jo Cullen, Frontenac House, 78 pages, $15.95

Details from the Edge of the Village, by Pierette Requier, Frontenac House, 110 pages, $15.95

Fifth World Drum, by Anna Marie Sewell, Frontenac House, 96 pages, $15.95

Things that Matter Now, by Bob Stallworthy, Frontenac House, 70 pages, $15.95

Reviewed here: Untitled Child , by Nancy Jo Cullen; Details from the Edge of the Village , by Pierrette Requier; Fifth World Drum , by Anna Marie Sewell; Things that Matter Now , by Bob Stallworthy

Each spring, Calgary-based publisher Frontenac House releases four books of poetry it calls the Frontenac Quartet. This year, the Quartet features four very different, but curiously complementary, voices.

The first of these, Fifth World Drum , by Anna Marie Sewell, left me with decidedly mixed feelings. Throughout the book there are flashes of a mythopoeic gravitas reminiscent of Ted Hughes' Crow , but there is also the triteness of Maya Angelou's rock-river-tree brand of generic nature imagery. It's a distracting kind of tennis match between the book's brilliance and its banality.

Certainly, many nature metaphors are now so well-trodden, like an old clay path, they are practically featureless. In the poem Birds in a Hurricane , for example, she compares the wind and rain of the storm to “breath and tears.” It is a disappointing aesthetic choice in an otherwise engrossing scenario.

Many of the poems in this book also adopt an overtly prayerful tone – thankful, reverent and inspirational. I must confess my own cantankerous allergy to anything so nakedly spiritual makes it impossible for me to be won over by these entries. It's doubtless the most difficult tone to pull off in serious poetry, and I'm sure the book would have been exponentially more commanding without them.

Still, my feelings are mixed, for when Sewell is good she can be very good. Take the poem Thunderstorms . I kept returning to its carnality, its cancer scars, its phantom cannibals living in the outhouse, its unbridled Freudian mayhem. Raw, wide-eyed and palpably electric, this is wonderful stuff, and I look forward to reading more of it from Anna Marie Sewell.

Details from the Edge of the Village , by Pierrette Requier, is another animal altogether. From the fanciful world of myth, we now enter into the unmistakably real. Mostly prose poems, these are naturalistically paced at the speed of casual thought, a sort of semi-distracted concentration. The physical world and the passing of time are always just outside the mental image, closing in, altering the thought path, producing tangents, reminding the thinker of something else, something Dad said, maybe, or the rate at which unwanted kittens are born in a rainy spring.

Although almost entirely interior monologues, these aren't unlikely daydreams; the use of the present tense and exacting detail (the poem Ca-na-da! and burn your bra! refers to “weasel-voiced little Father Spinach”) give these poems a hyper-realistic effect, such as you might experience when viewing cinéma-vérité or the paintings of Chuck Close.

It's almost eerie how immediately the poet is able to place her reader within the living minutiae of her book's private history. One thing that creates this verisimilitude is the naturalistic pacing of her writing; another, strangely enough, is a perfectly digestible amount of bilingualism. It lends a texture of specificity to the work, the unpredictable truths of the real world creeping in again, something that happens on multiple levels, creating layers of colour and credibility, as in the poem le bain du samedi soir when this happens: “i sometimes clown with them after the bath / become one of les plus jeunes/ choreograph silly dances à la musique des rigodons / we twang elastics/ jig to make Mom laugh/ Dad doesn't see.”

Like Requier's, Bob Stallworthy's territory in his fourth collection, Things That Matter Now , is one of intimate, domestic remembrance. Unlike Requier's, his style is more in keeping with traditional, modernist lyric poetry, less frenetic in its attentions, less formally inventive, almost immediately between W.C. Williams's imagist austerity and Milton Acorn's boisterous narrative style.

In a few poems, especially Not Complicated , Direct Sun , Forecast and some others, the rhetorical similarity to Acorn's poetry (especially from the More Poems for People era) is too strong to ignore. Stallworthy shares the islander's gift for letting the physicality of things tell their stories. In Visit to a Military Museum , “the house is a shell/ blasted into its emptiness.” In Highway Driving , “disregarded potholes” were “angry open sores we drove around.”

Some of Stallworthy's shorter, aphoristic poems, like What Were They Thinking? , come across as too slight or too sentimental to suffer the company of their more substantial neighbours, but they aren't the ones you'll remember once you've put down the book. The strongest poems here engage the reader head on; like Dickens's ghosts, they can show you someone else's life and trick you into examining your own.

If Nancy Jo Cullen's voice is the most striking of this quartet, it must be because it is the least familiar. By that I mean Cullen's poetic voice hasn't come prepackaged or set by any precedent. In Untitled Child , she isn't trying to be the shaman, or the memoirist, or the raconteur. Rather, it is clear that she has worked hard to carve her own niche from which to watch and wonder.

Who else but a singular talent could tell us “Our kids have become cluster bomblets Unpredictable love and shrapnel, bicycles and fists Our boy is like a dazed lemon tree Alone in the rubble of a Baghdad garden,” as Cullen does in her poem Tiny Bubbles ?

Reading Cullen's poems is a little like drinking booze. Definitely not wine, because it's not all that genteel, and not beer, because it's not all that commonplace, but hard liquor because it's edgy, fast-acting, more than a little disorienting and frequently mixed with something sweet.

Indeed, her mood, on the surface anyway, often seems light. She can appear witty ( Sunday Morning ), flippant ( Bad Hair Day ), or sarcastically urbane ( To the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ), but even these personae disguise the seriousness of her project. Cullen understands how we are entertained by our emotions, and this poetry is trained like a laser scope on our limbic systems.

She has even taken the poetic form I despise most, the list poem, and in her Kyrie Eleison written something, despite its prescribed architecture and my crabby bias, that both surprised and delighted me, and for this I would like to award her some kind of medal, except that I would probably have to buy one first.

Paul Vermeersch probably complains too much in Toronto. His next book of poems will be out next year.