There is a tendency for poets to fall under the spell of words. It’s hardly surprising – the allure of language is, after all, one of the attractions of the form. However, lacking seasoned restraint and confidence in their own voices, many young poets end up drowning in language, so burdening their poems that any clarity of vision is indistinguishable, any individuality lost or concealed. It is hardly surprising that Learning Russian, the debut collection from Toronto poet Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, often falls prey to this trap. It is encouraging, though, that her poetry shows signs of surpassing it.

Many of the poetic conceits in Learning Russian are bold and interesting. The title sequence, for example, positions the learning (or re-learning) of a language as a gate through which the student passes into a “garden” of truth and experience. Sadly, the poem stumbles under its own weight, and gets lost within its own metaphors. Bryden’s style, in this poem and many others, is an awkward combination of the overly poetic and the startlingly prosaic. The less said about the overwrought and cutesy “Things Go Better,” an homage to a Coke can that reads like a grade-school experiment in rhyme, the better.

In the midst of this excess and confusion, however, there are moments of pure beauty, immediacy, and clarity. The Zen-simple descriptions of “A Chair” say far more about the nature of existence and loss than more deliberately ambitious poems like “The History of Trains” and “Learning Russian,” while the plain-spoken “Peter’s Year” contains more emotional truth than most of the other poems in this slim volume combined.

Much of Learning Russian has the quality of journeyman work, steps in the process of finding her voice. If Bryden’s journey takes her in the direction of “A Chair” and “Peter’s Year,” she will be an impressive poet indeed.