RECENTLY while I was a writer in residence, I spent a couple of days reading D. G. Jones`s classic book on Canadian literature, Butterfly on Rock. Somewhere near the end of his chapter on the modernist poets, I noticed I was crying. Not sobbing, mind you, or even (as far as I was aware) feeling much of anything. In fact, I was having the hardest time merely deciphering the poems. Meanwhile, the tears were shamelessly trickling - presumably due to eye and brain fatigue, or maybe an allergy. Irrationally, I began wondering if this low-level, subcutaneous weeping might actually be a reaction to something in the poetry. Don`t get me wrong - I`m not accusing modernists of having feelings. I`m just referring to an underlying melancholy, a tone of quiet snivelling, hidden for the most part under mineralogical Canadian stoicism. I was blowing my nose and thinking things over when a student walked in, a brilliant girl and devoted reader of Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud. She surprised me by announcing that she`d just spent two days reading the Oxford Anthology of Canadian Poetry. None of it made sense to her, she told me in her flawless English, but somehow it all made her want to cry. For the wrong reasons. She couldn`t stand three years of this: she was going back to France. I stared at her through redrimmed eyes and managed to prevent myself from screaming, Take me with you! Instead I persuaded her to stay, if only for the snow - and because I thought we were really on to something. Ever since, I`ve been wondering if there may be cultural forms of pollution that can trigger subtle tears, and also whether it`s possible to grow allergic to one`s own literature. Actually, I`ve always tended to see poets the way miners see canaries ... (Oh, shut up!) Yes, well, squaring our shoulders and setting aside this whole subject of emotion in poetry, let`s slip down the shaft and see how the little feathered barometers are doing. Not too well, I`m afraid - if "doing well" means "feeling good." Of the seven books under review here, five deal in various ways with immigration and exile, the other two with mental illness and suicide. And everyone, except Carol Shields, is depressed about nearly everything. Nobody actually weeps out loud, or reveals their personal history of sexual abuse, but there`s plenty of displaced rage of the kind usually reserved for Brian Mulroney. So, tell me, Canadians - what`s your problem? I suppose as a "reviewer" I could take a military approach: line these poets up, give them a welcoming pep talk, and then start humiliating them. But I think I`ll just rank them in order of quality, starting with (my idea of) "best." "Best," I think, does apply to John Mikhail Asfour`s One Fish from the Rooftop (Cormorant, 71 pages, $10.95 paper). Blinded at 14 by a grenade, Asfour came to Canada in 1964 at the age of 22, already a published poet in his native Lebanon. Much of this book is a recreation of the village of Aitaneet, a place whose existence -who knows? - may now actually depend on Asfour`s memory of it. He manages to convince us of the fragility of the visible world without glossing over its horrors: Those of us who have some sight left do not see children playing in the alleys. Those who hear a little wonder: how many sleeping pills would silence the crickets at night? Alive, yet aware of death we`ve made and destroyed our own legend. ("We Have Some Sight Left") Asfour`s voice merges with his homeland as naturally as "Birds / gabble from each roof `and "the blind postman makes his tour" in the first poem ("Off the Map"). There`s no groping for metaphors -they well up from memory. "Ben Hilali`s Night of Revels" follows a drunken poet in his wanderings through a war-torn city. It`s a tour de force of irony, richly allusive of tradition and place. In Canada, "Beirut" is a synonym for devastation, but there are hells and hells. The poems set in Montreal are as full of plateglass window-gazing as any written in Canada, and turn on those sexual moments and other well-spaced glimpses of meaning-inemptiness that pass for revelation in our safely ordered world. Asfour inhabits both his universes with an exquisite ambivalence that never seems posed. He positions himself amid many kinds of loss, in ways that suggest poetry`s "power" is less a matter of words than of where and how one stands when the sky starts to fall. When it comes to bottled pain, laced with acuity and surrealism, Linda Rogers`s Letters from the Doll Hospital (Sono Nis, 94 pages, $9.95 paper) deserves a place on every medicine shelf. Rogers is a Vancouver writer, broadcaster, and performance artist whom the Vancouver Sun has compared to "Verlaine and Rimbaud at their best." That`s overstating it slightly. What she is is a comically gifted, sensitive, honest poet with a feel for tragedy. She dissects those dreamlike North American moments, which in Asfour`s work seem anticlimactic, to reveal their apocalyptic flame: Her sister is home starting fires. In one of her previous lives, she died that way. She remembers the circus, the flaming tent, the clown with his oversized foot in her face. ("Home Fires") Unlike many less gifted poets for whom last lines are a mere formality, Rogers tips the weight towards the end. With periodic sentences constantly climaxing like little grenades, she drives her readers on to the next minefield. There`s a refreshing gravity about her writing, a sense of falling into truths half-unawares. And music is more than a metaphor turning up now and then in allusions to Bach, Mozart, and Gould: it`s an ordering principle deeper than language itself, as basic as sex and marriage - which she also writes about well. Only towards the end did I notice occasional shifts to automatic pilot, as if Rogers were going through the motions of fuguing to fill up her quota of poems. Continuing now, in slow descent, the canaries are starting to have respiratory problems. Of course, I blame the environment. You`d never guess from the title, When Shaving Seems Like Suicide (Goose Lane, 95 pages, $12.95 paper), that while reading John B. Lee you`d be in the presence of an exceptional writer who, it seems to me, has been trained by life not to care too deeply. The result is an uneven book, apparently predicated on a marketing strategy that says you should entertain the reader at all times. Yuk yuk. So amid a series of "slight efforts" that really do live up to their cute, adolescent titles (titles such as "The Day the Village Garage Burned," "When I Was Young and Mr. Peanut Walked the Fairs ... .. Emily Dickinson`s Hamster," and "The Day the Geese Exploded") are five or six real poems, often about fathers and sons. Thematically, the book begins around page 90: VVhat fathers have lost can never be found when they bring up the wrong sons in the lumber business. Every board-pinched day their wingless shoulders stooped over saw-horse struts in the wood-cut dust and their slivered hands running the pine length of a dull life ("What Fathers Have Lost") Perhaps Lee (or his editor) wanted to avoid being sentimental and predictable, and framed these poems as the work of a rural Dadaist. The cover painting, "Pink Sink," by Christopher Pratt, suggests concealed razor blades that never actually get unwrapped. There are flashes of brilliance in unlikely places, like "The Vet Says My Old Dog Blows Hair." But listlessness and shaky last lines doom others to the status of exercises. Next down the shaft comes Stan Rogal, an intelligent, witty writer with a talent for wordplay. I admired the ambition of Sweet Betsy from Pike (Wolsak and Wynn, 75 pages, $ 10 paper): to turn the mind-numbing lyrics of that old American (I always thought it was Canadian!) folk-song, "Sweet Betsy from Pike," into a metaphor for all that is morbid in North America. Yoked to their cattle and spotted hog, not to mention their imperialist (and other) drives, poor Betsy and her husband, Ike, become prime colonial agents of destruction. I was game for this at first, but gradually began to wilt under Rogal`s environmentalist rage, shot in lurid overkill. Hosts of vampires flap around and "hang frostbitten from the limbs" of too many trees in this primeval forest of Heavy Metal. Nymphs, dragons, and angels pull mythological moons under "the malignant course of stars." Rogal can`t seem to stop writing in the plural. I guess I would have liked to see less "environment" and more Rogal. I wouldn`t dare question his integrity - I just don`t share his passion for "a scape so elemental / Eyes long to exit the skull and root the seething muck" ("Ciphers"). On the other hand, if there ever was a poet to articulate our collective death-wish, Stan Rogal is It. Three books struck me as weak for reasons that I would need another thousand words to explain. So let me just say that Peter Stevens`s Swimming in the Afternoon: New and Selected Poems (Black Moss, 62 pages, $10.95 paper) has a dated, dutifully "modernist" feel about it. The poems often seem to slump into a shrug of what must once have been fashionable despair. Even in despair, the fashions keep changing. There`s a pervasive sense of bewilderment at being "beached on a wordless continent" - Stevens seems particularly appalled and fascinated by prairie landscape. Slowly, over three decades, the poems accommodate themselves to Canada, country of last resort for those of his generation who fled Britain in "the closing dusk of empire." Many echo better-known Canadians whom Stevens, also an editor, admired and anthologized. Partly because I`m running out of space, I can`t find much to say about Carol Shields`s Coming to Canada (Carleton University Press, 91 pages, $10.95 paper). I`m not convinced by the editor Christopher Levenson`s argument that Shields`s prominence in Canadian fiction justifies this collection. Poetry can`t afford that degree of casualness. Partly due to design and packaging, the book feels scattered and lightweight. A relentless "sunniness" whites out the few strong poems, mainly about family life. Whatever her real intentions, Shields comes across as a kind of displaced child star, unable not to perform for her doting public. Kevin Irie`s Burning the Dead (Wolsak and Wynn, 84 pages, $ 10 paper) overworks its single theme: the suffering of Japanese Canadians. Canadian Literature says that Ine`s work evokes "the lean brevity of haiku," but I kept noticing long, overbearing passages written in double dactyls. The tone of accusation and blame struck me as inflated and melodramatic: there are certainly less self-righteous ways of writing past wrongs. In a younger writer, this might be forgivable. Somehow the book`s title and the beautiful cover photo of a blazing pyre seem truer and more respectful of their subject than the poems.