Certain things in this world are still better when they’re made the old-fashioned way. Certain things, but not always art. When art is made the old-fashioned way, it just feels, well, old-fashioned. As a poet, John Donlan is a skilled versifier with an ear for metre and an eye for line, but the poems in his latest collection, Green Man, feel generic, old hat. These poems, which claim to investigate mankind’s relationship to nature and the city, do little to distinguish themselves from the bulk of tired pastorales that have been giving Canadian poetry the reputation of being dull, folksy, and behind the times for the past 30 years or so.

What makes this such a shame is that Donlan’s last book, Baysville (1993), was so much tighter, more thematically controlled, a real achievement – poems that merged life and place so seamlessly – whereas much of Green Man feels rehashed. Granted, many of these poems are tightly woven and well polished, but they have the feel of hobby-verse. They don’t dig as deep as those in Baysville.

At their worst, these poems are simply overcooked descriptions of the banal, as in “Mid-May”: “On mossy hillocks, on snow flattened grass / squirrels scatter showers of woody flakes, / gobbling a new-found wealth of pine cones.” At their best, the poems fall short of being gripping. “Picture,” my favourite in the collection, is full of violent children threatening each other with pellet guns, stones, and castration, complete with a dramatic ending – a young mother’s suicide. But it feels sing-songy, a little too pretty. It lacks the sting of pellets and stones and the shock of discovering the young mother’s body.

The poet’s attempts to wax rhapsodic – “He sips the million-scented air,” or philosophical, “How strangely level a full life seems / after a habit of solitude’s / dimly felt unvoiced extremities,” – feel out of place, anachronistic, and saccharine. A reader can’t help but trip on such lines, and Green Man is full of them. Still, a little voice keeps repeating that there’s a poetic skill at work here, one that has proven itself in the past, and could have been put to better use.