As the end of the millennium approaches, where will serious Canadian writers position themselves in the coming mass-media onslaught of predictions and summations?

With his new book, Manitoba’s Patrick Friesen places himself firmly in the apocalyptic camp. A Broken Bowl is a long and angry lament broken into short sections that together constitute the poet’s avowed aim “to find the words that will say something concerning a disintegrating world I love.” In Friesen’s view, we live in spiritually bereft times, tormented by global holocaust (one section is a litany of 20th-century misery and conflict), dogged by personal demons, and lied to and exploited by those in positions of authority. And when we are not victims of powerful forces, we are “romans with our headaches and anxiety we are a trivial people/brutish and blind.”

Hard words, indeed, and though the Roman metaphor is clichéd, it does capture the poet’s general tone as he relentlessly details our penchant for self-destruction. In a variety of voices, sometimes his own, and sometimes that of the age itself, Friesen returns repeatedly to his central point: our civilization is sick. In A Broken Bowl, people commit suicide, “rats rap[e] each other/on dead-end road,” “the walls are crawling with melanoma,” and “cities gnaw[…] at their own bones.” Like a torturer, the poet tapes our eyes open and forces us to stare at his disturbing images.

The experience, however, is not uncomfortable, and this points toward a crucial flaw in Friesen’s poem: its content is bleak and its tone alternately angry and elegiac, but its language is not interesting enough to make the content and tone truly meaningful. The poet switches from an unpunctuated, free verse style to an unpunctuated, incantatory rhythm, and each voice does contribute to a thematic structure (drowning figures prominently) that suggests some attention has been paid to craft.

Nevertheless, I remained distinctly unmoved by Friesen’s often prosaic, sometimes Biblically parodic language, and by his dark vision. Indeed, I felt I was being lectured to by someone whose morality is presented as gospel rather than being sung to by a poet whose words are offered as vivid possibilities.

While I can applaud Friesen’s empathetic attempt to register global and individual suffering, I cannot celebrate the result. Without a resonant language to carry its content, A Broken Bowl is little more than a catalogue of harsh realities.