I always feel slightly uncomfortable reviewing someone's poetry. Unlike reviewing a novel, where you can make relatively objective comments based on how well an author has established characters or developed the plot, poems have to be judged on how well you believe the poet has communicated something far more ethereal. Just because you are not impressed with how a poet has chosen to express him or herself, does that necessarily make it less valid a piece that you approve of?

Unlike in previous generations, when poetry was confined by meter or structure, the free verse of today can't be judged by a poet's ability to maintain a complicated rhythm or include the right number of syllables in each line. It doesn't even matter if the words make "no sense" when you read them, as it's their ability to make you feel that's important. You can't even set one poet's work against another to see how it compares. Poetry is such an individual matter that there is usually little or nothing that one can use as a basis for comparison.

What I usually end up with is an attempt to judge how successful the poet has been in either expressing an overall emotion or feeling with his poem, much like an abstract artist would with his canvass, or in recreating the moment in time that he or she was inspired to try and capture with the poem. While it doesn't prevent me from being subjective in my critique, at least it gives me something objective to consider.

There are some prose writers whose work tells you that they would be equally adept at writing poetry as they are at fiction. It's not that their work is poetic, more that they have an ear for creating imagery when they write. A good indication is when you read their work you are able to see in your mind's eye what they are writing about with little or no effort on your part. This doesn't mean they spend page after page writing descriptions of the scenery - in fact it usually is the opposite. The prose writer with the potential to be a good poet would be one who can use the fewest words possible, yet still imbue a scene with beauty and emotion.

Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay has always impressed me with his ability to evoke whatever atmosphere he desires in an apparently effortless fashion. He is equally adroit at bringing to life sumptuous scenes in royal courts as he is the horrors of a battlefield, and like a good painter, knows exactly when to remove the brush from the canvas so as not to mar the image with too much detail. Quite a few of his novels have contained either poetry or song, so his readers have been given hints as to his talent as a poet, and in 2003 he published a book of poetry.