Prologue for the Age of Consequence

Garth Martens’ debut, Prologue for the Age of Consequence, is about the tar sands and industrial projects of Alberta, and the men who work in them. But to describe it as such restricts the book to its physical concerns, when in fact these are poems of great philosophical ambition, and startling ethical and psychological reach.

Martens has made an elemental world both beautiful and severe, and on his stage, characters assume a collective status both emphatically human and radically mythic. He...