All in all, this book contains some poems that should never really have made it into print, but others that deserve to be anthologized. Cornberg can be garrulous and pedantic, but then so could Whitman, not to mention Pound. The point, however, is that an English-language poet publishing his own work here in Asia who can, even if only on occasion, be compared with these celebrated names deserves to be noticed.
That having been said, David Cornberg never attains the instantly recognizable note, even in his Alaskan poems, of some other recent English-language nature poets — Ted Hughes, for instance. Nonetheless, there is real skill and communicated emotion here, even if it’s easily diffused in too-widely-spread subject matter. My view is that this writer is a very talented poet of Alaskan nature and should be content to accept that. This is not to say that collections of his Alaskan poems would simply sell well to tourists. To write well about one place is implicitly to write about everywhere, and, after all, the call of the north has found many answering voices — Jack London, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien in prose, plus most English nature poets (Gerard Manley Hopkins, for instance, disliked the coarseness of the grass even in France, just across the English Channel).
As for his religious experience, often Buddhist in tone, it’s hard to reconcile this with ripping a pike out of a lake with the aid of ultra-hi-tech fishing gear, as described in one poem.
Cornberg writes too much poetry, it seems (plus books on such topics as semiotics). But he should spend more time in Alaska, and then write as much as he likes about it. This is his strongest suit, and he should play its trump cards whenever he has the opportunity.
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