The poems in A Ghost in Waterloo Station take the everyday world as their point of departure, but the place of arrival is never the shore you started from. Vivid invocations and meditations on childhood, art, and travel bring together places and people as likeable and unexpected as the wry poetic sensibility recommending them to our attention. Greece is a country where clarity / is inescapable unless it forces your lids shut. Swallows enter their nests high on the white stacked walls at Indian Lodge as if the ghost/ of a remorseful pickpocket/ were slipping a wallet/ back where it come from. There is much humour here, and warmth, combined with an awareness of loss and the weight of history—all delivered in a voice distinctive in its combination of narrative, whimsy, and psychological observation.

Bert Almon won the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Award for Poetry for Earth Prime (Brick) in 1998. He has been a Hawthornden Fellow in Poetry and a finalist in the Blackwell’s/Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition. His poems have appeared in journals such as The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Prairie Fire, Descant, Prism international, and Queen’s Quarterly. He lives in Edmonton, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta.

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Here is a thoughtful collection written by a mature poet who has traveled and enjoys a large enough experience to understand patterns and paradoxes that enrich life. —Prairie Fire Magazine