Don’t let the title fool you: this debut collection by Toronto poet Alice Burdick is anything but simple. The book is quartered into segments that seem to lend a menu-like efficiency to its consumption. The most palatable of these parts is “Spadina Way,” a long meditation on Toronto’s Chinatown. The most accessible portion, “Small Times,” brings together elegies to a dead lover. But delete the four chapter headings and you have a hodgepodge of lyrics that are often allergic to meaning.

The worst of these poems read as though a bricklayer helped compose them – sentences of the same length and weight are joined end to end: “Hunger can be filled with steps into the ocean. Oceans rarely peel back/into voids because they ripple back and forth. They keep filling up the removed/parts. Plains covered by dragging feet. People noticed that birds/were circling above, sweeping over the plains as if leading.”

Worse yet, Burdick mistakes obscurity for ambiguity, cramming each poem with undeveloped symbols: “I think now other planets have problems, too./We could stay and die. Pooped and duped,/like some astronaut, like you.” If that were a Radiohead lyric, the melody might sculpt emotional weight from the abstract wording. But in the absence of an accompanying CD, Simple Master reads like the liner notes to an album you sold off years ago.

The longer poem, “Spadina Way,” tosses a redemptive coin into the jukebox. Faced with an actual place, Burdick both sketches the reality of Toronto’s derelict Chinatown and improvises on its themes: “How deep was Oscar’s garbage can?/ There was an echo to his ‘yes,’ growled deep down and tinny./Ladders and ladders, levels of garbage and memorabilia,/rooms locked off.”

Chinatown’s chaotic nature seems best suited to Burdick’s style, allowing her to lope successfully among pensive and manic tones. Too bad the poem’s epiphanies – “Incoherence is a family trait” and “This is one country that speaks fluent confusion” – point an accusing finger at the book’s weaknesses.