The Globe and Mail

Eugene McNamara's 15th collection, Spindrift, is well titled: His deliberate, tamped-down style and fragmentary awareness convey evanescence – wisps briefly perceived. I appreciated the sparseness, as opposed to formalists striving to make it new on every line; however, over the collection, monotony dominates: “too much noise to talk above and/ nothing to say and// it's not even noon and the afternoon/ will be worse.”

Spindrift comprises four sequences: Liturgy follows the festivals of the Catholic calendar; Misplaced Persons situates literary icons outside their usual haunts; Art and Life renders paintings; and Spindrift evokes memory and loss.

Liturgy was the most quietly powerful. McNamara, in letting our daily needs and wants – insomnia, going to the store for bread, awkward palm branches slipping off pews – reverberate against Christ's story, allows the religious myths to irradiate and transform the present – or is it vice versa? – amplifying the meaning of the “ordinary time” between festivals.

He frames the mythic events in quotidian trials. Advent is an insomniac's thoughts. Ordinary Time is a lacuna at a quiet resort. Holy anticipation is the predominant note, with a few surprises: Christ writes in the dirt, and the narrator says, “I like to think it was my name written in the dust.”

Most successfully, Good Friday is imagined as an empty train station at night:

A man with a cleaning cart goes by –
The car wheels shriek ….

I call out your name like the names of cities
A weary voice intones the cities like beads on a rosary

Are we there yet?
Are we nearly there?

The blood of the myth has welled into the everyday wound.

Misplaced Persons has Henry James watching stockyard workers on a streetcar (he says “desolate” four times); Evelyn Waugh touring Windsor – you get the idea. These are one-note poems, extended beyond the promise of their premises. The eeriest is T.S. Eliot encountering the word “Prufrock” on a brick wall in St. Louis. This sequence shows the limitations of McNamara's style. He ends almost every stanza with a dash, and I expected an elision, a radical break, a breathless transport to new inspiration – but no, it's just more of the same.

He went to Niagara Falls and on to
Chicago without noticing –

He kept silent –

Not much to comment there –

McNamara's general lack of formal variation delivers little delight; he may well want to dispense with the normal means of summoning sense from sound, but when the placement of words doesn't matter, the effect is a flat catalogue of remarks that don't evoke the boring so much as create it. The overuse of the present participle is lazy writing, not timeless ennui:

Or the bars in the afternoon dark
muttering serious drinking going on
people close dancing to oldies and
women dance with the wrong men.

McNamara has a poet's eye, no doubt – but his style has become a mannerism – too many poems you want to rewrite – when all sounds the same, aphoristic conclusions, “These objects by the side of/ the road won't go away// Like grief,” flub and fall – and yet – moments of genuine poignancy – is monotony a tonal achievement? – the thing is, oddly, he moved me, occasionally – an old man sitting in a park:

The way out of the park is under the
kicked football which soars and drop
down and punt echoes across the field
and punt in return and as the ball
soars up in its pure arc in the high
light the day swings down and what
is left to break the chill wind?

Steve Noyes's fourth collection, Morbidity and Ornament, comes out this fall.