A MONTH`S WORTH of Canadian poetry need not exemplify all the conflicting trends in current poetics, though the eight collections under review here run a scale, the low and high limits of which would probably complain equally of the other`s amateur music. Of course virtually all Canadian poetry is amateur, and not in the French sense. This is why so many collections are published and so few are read. The amateur, in the North American sense, has no interest in keeping up with what is new, and the general reader mostly ignores poetry. Jeffery Donaldson`s Once Out of Nature (McClelland & Stewart, 75 pages, $12.95 paper) certainly represents one end of the spectrum, exemplifying as it does what has petulantly been called the new formalism. This is Donaldson`s first book, and it comes festooned with a prefatory note by the American poet (and old formalist) Richard Howard. The poems deal mainly with art - Monet, Heidegger, Mandelstam, Vitruvius, Rilke, and Mahler are, among others, the subjects of Donaldson`s work. This is poetry at a very comfortable remove from the world, and the result is discomfiting in its elegant coolness and stanzaic regularity. Donaldson has mastered a conventional form of poetic address of this kind : Only twenty minutes before closing, and already the attendant, slowly coming around to himself, lets his eye pass over the diminishing clusters of lagging tourists, we few still losing our way between rooms, not really looking, and heavy now with that unusual exhaustion we feel here for having been, ("By Word of Mouth: At the National Portrait Gallery, London") Unfortunately this is a music that is earnest but without resonance, despite the Yeatsian pretensions of the book`s title. Christopher Levenson`s latest collection, Half Truths (Wolsak and Wynn, 88 pages, $9 paper), is conventional, but in a less tiresome way. Levenson`s modest free-verse poems are small-scale and unassuming for the most part: Mass-produced, moulded from clay, to serve tea in the steam of railway platforms, they are disposable. Hastily fired, never glazed, their crude workmanship is used once, then discarded, the shards reabsorbed between the sleepers into the clay. Thus "Cups," and thus Levenson`s attractive strengths and all too apparent weaknesses. His language never overreaches itself and stays pretty close to the conversational bone. But the risk of banality, often taken, is often lost, and the poems too often end awkwardly with a self-conscious nudge toward metaphor. Bill Howell`s Moonlight Saving Time (Wolsak and Wynn, 88 pages, $9 paper) disappoints not so much by conventionality as by awkwardness verging on incompetence. The confusion of poetry with earnestness and serious personal experience is a sure sign of the amateur, and Moonlight Saving Time is guilty on both counts. The missing quantity (for private stories and even earnestness can be part of poetry) is, of course, artistry - a knowledge of how the constituent elements of the language combine micro- and macroscopically to create poetry. Howell is too often willing to let pass lines like these: He looks like the idea of a dog. A dog will never betray you. This is the absolute wonder of dog love. Meanwhile, he shits everywhere. These are the moments we expected without ever relinquishing them. And these are the choices we made before we knew ourselves well enough to know we`d really be here. ("Morgan`s Cave") Howell`s work inspires trust in the sense that the genuineness of the material is obvious. But that, and a certain cleverness with words, does not make it poetry. With Helen Humphreys`s Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios (Brick, 80 pages, $9.95 paper), though the reach is small, we do at least begin to get a little poetry. Humphreys chooses her words carefully and deploys them in a classically imagist manner, though she is not an imagist per se: What you think you will remember is the colour of the sea or the kite above it snagged on clouds, a red and yellow lure cast into the sky. ("Souvenirs") This is a spare sort of music, and Humphreys sticks to it pretty consistently. A series of six poems entitled "Brochures" takes it as far, perhaps, as it will go, by holding decisively to simple descriptive statements that double as photographs. The title poem engages the disjunction between a photograph and its caption, and slides cleverly into an aside about the truth of poetry. Of another order entirely is Kim Maltman`s Technologies/Installations (Brick, 92 pages, $9.95 paper), a collection of predominantly prose poems interlarded with what bpNichol used to call "trad" poems. 1 continue to think that the prose poem offers immense possibilities for contemporary verse, and Maltman writes an interesting and attractive version of it: It`s Hallowe`en - the Day of the Dead - and people are dancing, filling the room to bursting with such contrary notions and impressions as careen and ricochet about the walls, fragmented, like those late night stations on the radio that fade or rise out of the static, jostling one another for the very fibre of existence. ("The Technology of the Day of the Dead") In the absence of the line, the controlling force in a prose poem must be the sentence; and Maltman`s handling of the sentence sometimes lacks grace, particularly (as often happens) when he pushes it to serpentine lengths segmented by a flurry of commas: There was, at first, the dirt road, freshly graded, of which I would still sometimes dream in later years, leading off into the open, empty countryside, countryside which, in those dreams, was peopled with improbable but ordinary towns, acquaintances from later years, transported, inexplicably, to raucous prairie bars, calmly tucking glasses of beer into inner suit jacket pockets, boomtowns whose existence, even had it corresponded to the likeliest among those sleepy, scattered towns, could not have been the more implausible, producing valuable but unspecified commodities. ("The Technology of Mortality") In passages like these Maltman proves himself the Henry James of the prose poem. It is a style that perfectly suits his cerebral meditations. AirWave DreamScapes (Ergo Publications, 82 pages, $11.95 paper), edited by Tim McLaughlin and his lower-cased colleague robin, is an anthology of pieces that were aired on the student radio station of the University of Western Ontario. Well-known poets such as James Reaney, Christopher Dewdney, and Tim Lilburn are joined by local and student writers, including the two editors, both of whom have contributed interesting pieces. Two scenes from Reaney`s play The Boy Actors comprise the liveliest and most amusing writing in the anthology, while the other dramatic excerpt in the book - from Tim Lilburn`s Journeys: An A Capella Opera for the Dead - is pinchbeck and unconvincing. "This isn`t writing. This is washing out the frying pan, the cocoa-ing cup, the chewing cap," says the Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert of the work in Azure Blues (Talonbooks, 160 pages, $11.95 paper). Gilbert`s work tends to the daybook entry, and is artless in a way, though anything but naive. His concerns are determinately local and specific. But a wonderfully quirky sense of humour informs these poems, melded sometimes with a vaguely language- centred poetics. "Bursts of Friendliness" is a good example of Gilbert`s charm: when a chunk of the story repeats itself & homer & chandler do it all the time there`s a faintly mental smell & you can tell you`re in the presence of poetry i went to the convention of the american institute for the preservation of historic & artistic works saying i heard there was someone here who could make my poems last forever rock & roll is all one song kids want to be beautiful any poem is one more. There is a peculiar ghostly quality to this book that is difficult to put one`s finger on. Lines jump out by their cleverness or wisdom - "not watching tv every day / improves your dreams every night" or "seen from history time is pain / seen from time history is panic" - but much of the time the poems engage a shadowy rhetoric limning a shadowy sensibility. "There`s ghosts in them there words," says Gilbert, and he`s right. Finally there is Roy Miki`s first collection, Saving Face: Poems Selected 1976-1988 (Turnstone, 90 pages, $8.95 paper). Miki is better known as a critic and editor (he now edits West Coast Line, which combines his own Line with the West Coast Review) than as a poet, but these are not unattractive occasional pieces that focus on his Japanese-Canadian heritage, his family, and his work in the redress movement. The style owes much to Miki`s enthusiasms for writers such as Nichol, Kroetsch, Bowering, and others, but it has its own qualities: you came this way once in a subway (i waved) dressed in a pin-stripe suit with a chain suspended from its vest pocket i waved again you stood drawn toward me & missed the train ("untitled") These are quiet poems that nevertheless remain in the mind long after reading.