Ask any old sailor worth his salt: the purpose of a hitch is to tie the best possible line – to wrap around an object and cinch down tight. Therein lies the aim of New Brunswick poet Matthew Holmes’s first collection, a literary knot that binds a diverse group of subjects.

In these pages, you’ll find a prose poem about a man who makes phony lost dog posters, a playful depiction of Italian chemist Amedeo Avogadro, and a beer tab rescued from the back of a throat. This is no simple knot, to be certain, tethering together as it does such a broad band of castaways. But what lies at the centre is a methodology that is simultaneously far-reaching and personal, and ripe with mytho-poetic biographies, rich metaphors (“My father was an icefloe cowboy”), and well-drawn figures on loan from the poet’s life and imagination.

Within such an eclectic gathering, there are inevitably poems that fail to add much to the collection as a whole and others that appear underwritten. In an effort to pare down his work, Holmes leaves more than one promising premise underdeveloped, slipping – particularly in the book’s final section – into a clever but unsatisfying suggestiveness. Here is a poet who succeeds best when he renders his explorations fully, creating work solid enough not to slip out of the knot.