The cover of Ending with Music pays tribute to the under-appreciated American poet John Berryman, and the poems contained here reflect some of Berryman’s syntactical inventiveness as well as revealing author Maurice Mierau’s preoccupation with religion, history, and death.

The best moments in this first collection show off Mierau’s technical skill. He knows how to build resentment through repetition alone – in “Silent referendum,” an exasperated narrator asks, “When will you explain what you did?” three bitter times. We never learn precisely what was done, but the sense of frustrated rage is palpable. Mierau also has a knack for ingenious enjambment. Young cads in 1933 Saskatchewan are described as “heading west, sunning/themselves in bottle blondes.” An evangelical believer’s soul is “oozing onto his mother/of pearl belt inlays like a blood stain.”

Such tricks of the poet’s trade are carried off admirably. But when Mierau abandons the more obvious devices, his emotional intensity fades. A number of poems in “Murders,” the book’s middle section, document the deaths of Christian martyrs – and that’s all they do. The tales of execution are related in language so clean it reads like fragmented prose. Elsewhere, the weightiest lines fall flat. The final line of “What you can’t write about” – which turns out to be the annihilating fury of war – closes a good poem on a disappointingly prosaic note: “that’s war, as if it were like the weather,/uncontrollable but strangely part of us.”

Ending with Music is readable throughout, but Mierau’s poetic competence highlights a problem that plagues much contemporary poetry. The most successful stylistic effects here are also the most traditional ones, and the themes presented are equally tired. Such mimicry begins to wear on the soul.