There is a line from Adam Getty’s Gerald Lampert Award-winning first poetry collection, Reconciliation, that encapsulates one of his larger thematic concerns: “There// is nothing human here but the usual/ grinding beneath the wheel.”
    In this, his sophomore collection, Getty mines much of that same thematic territory, though the voice here is more studied than before, less colloquial. Repose gains momentum from its opening poem, “On Liberty,” which makes oblique reference to the 9/11 tragedy, and in so doing, frames the rest of the book within our modern context of diminished freedoms.
    In Getty’s poetry, urbanization and the natural world are in constant opposition. Hamilton, where the poet currently resides, becomes an apocalyptic vision of iniquity and industry, prostitutes and steel, in which “old brownstones [are] burnt out and gutted,/ condemned” and “addicts and hookers/ [are] folding clothes into used dressers, standing/ and stirring a pot.” Away from such desolation, there’s “Africa, some place/ soil could still be felt and known.”
    Getty’s neo-Romantic take on modernity, heavily inspired by William Blake, registers disgust at our current age of mass production and the consumerist impulse that fuels it. Repose occasionally channels the more hysterical aspects of the Romantics (“Can the ardent cry/ still arise from assailed labour, arms laden and abused/ till they lower and languish in their lengthening lament?”), but for the most part, the book is a measured, well-articulated piece of work from an intriguing new voice in Canadian poetry.