While still a University of Toronto student, Wayne Clifford shared the 1967 E.J. Pratt Award with Michael Ondaatje. He was present at the creation of Coach House Press, and has written 10 previous books, including an unpublished collaboration with bp Nichol. So when Clifford’s new collection On Abducting the ’Cello takes up the subject of long-term dedication to an artistic pursuit, the author benefits from some experience.

Clifford’s 53 poems – sonnets all – offer playful, reflective, and mocking meditations on (among other themes) the value of artistic practice. The vehicle for all of this is the tale of a sustained love affair with a cello, one of the orchestra’s more imposing and easily anthropomorphized instruments.

Clifford handles the form with humorous familiarity, nimbly picking his way through the gamut of sonnet stanza forms, in rhythms both jazzy and iambic. But why sonnets? And why a cello? Both entail a rich artistic inheritance for Clifford to play upon. This lets the poems delve into questions of art and 20th-century evil. (Clifford’s tact falters as he works Hitler into his poems as “the Leader singing Leider.”)

The book attains its weightiest pitch only gradually, after a resolutely playful opening. As the cello, like a loved one, comes to mean practically everything, Clifford suggests we can place too much weight on any beloved object. The later poems become valedictory and the ’cello becomes “a burdened ampersand /that tried to tie loose ends.” Perhaps art solves nothing in the end. Still, it’s “cheaper than a shrink and twice as light of /heart.”

Throughout the collection, Clifford’s tightly wrought diction verges on verbal contortionism. Poetry, like pie-crust, can suffer from being worked for too long. At their best, though, Clifford’s sonnets surprise with wit and pithy ambiguity.