From traditional formal poetry to free verse, from the lyrical pieces to clever turns of phrase, from experimental verse to plainspoken frankness, there is something to satisfy all tastes in Were the Bees, the debut collection from Edmonton poet and English teacher Andy Weaver. The correlative of this expansiveness, however, is that it is difficult to arrive at an overarching opinion of the volume as a whole. Every reader will find much to admire here, along with some poesy they’ll simply dislike.

Divided into three parts, the collection begins with a series of lyrical, emotional pieces. Tinged with sadness and loss, the poems in this section reveal a subtle joy in the transient nature of the mundane and the fleeting. One poem, “blood lust,” is a celebration of intimate knowledge and shared experience, while “Tangle” is a wrenching evocation of love and loss. The experimental “Kandinsky’s Composition VIII (for four voices)” forces an ongoing rereading and revisioning through its very form, while the similar “Starstuff (for three simultaneous voices)” is too much of the same and feels forced.

Poems like “a red wet roz” (in which phonetic spelling conceals and reveals what is, ultimately, a fairly lowbrow joke) and “To” (an experiment in form seemingly for form’s sake) are symptomatic of an ongoing problem: Weaver’s appreciation of his own cleverness. Poems are too often built around punchlines or twist endings. This tendency hamstrings the title poem, a lengthy cut-and-paste reworking of a 1969 interview with Robert Duncan by George Bowering and Robert Hogg. While the piece is at times a revelatory exploration of poetics in both form and content, it often bogs down.

The closing series of ghazals is strong stuff, and leaves the best impression possible of Weaver as a young poet. With a collection as daring and expansive as this, readers should be forgiving of youthful excesses and look forward to the next book.