“The poet must know style,” writes Jeff Bien in Prosody at the Cafe du Coin “or he will simply be a complainer.” This eastern Ontario poet has style: entire oceans, trans-continental highways, and sprawling metropoli of the stuff. It has won him numerous awards, including special commendation in the 1988 Arvon Competition judged by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.

In his first two books, America & Other Poems and Prosody at the Cafe du Coin, published simultaneously by Quarry Press, Bien’s precise language and metrics do their job, covering icy contemporary angst with a neatly woven blanket of something warmer. The insulation is welcome; these are often powerfully depressing poems.

America & Other Poems is the more misanthropic of the two volumes. Pages written in the repetitive style of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” catalogue the horrors of Western life. From the fall of the Berlin Wall, to Holocaust themes, to drug dens, prostitution, pornography, and AIDS, America is both the cause and effect of intense fear and hatred.

Poems such as “Madness is a Dull Cow” and “Pippi Longstocking, the Pin-up Girl, Christ and Other Small Prayers” pack a wallop in every word. The litanous, existential raging of “America” and “A Choice of Masters” is less successful. It sounds good – and probably makes good listening on the CD Bien has recorded of the book – but when content takes a back seat to form, meaning can get tossed out the window like a McDonald’s coffee cup.

Many of the poems in Prosody at the Cafe du Coin are similarly bitter and detached, but in an easier-to-swallow format. Bien’s style here harkens to the early moderns, and again he is technically pristine in his adaptation of form for his own purposes. Each line is well formed, the poems are very well written. The back cover carries multiple accolades. And yet, as a reader, I had trouble connecting with the book.

The difficulty may arise from the depersonalization of what essentially are very personal poems. Most of the poems in the first half of Prosody read like manifestos: what poetry is, references to the poet’s past and present influences, observations on life’s trials. The confidence of the proselytizing voice deals in absolutes, however, and does not permit an approach from any world view other than straight-out dissent.

The last half of Prosody is different again. Here are the love poems, the glimpses of an emotional core that allow feeling to join with thought – a welcome bit of humanism. Anger, cynicism, and critical thought are certainly viable poetic subjects, but the addition of love, sorrow, and compassion round out the collection, allowing readers like me something to sink our hooks into.