A Fan's Playground

Reading Robert Service as a kid was what made me first realise I could actually like poetry. Before that I'd mostly been exposed either to children's-book doggerel, or poetry not literal enough for young me to yet have the skills to make sense of. (Also when I was a kid I was pretty rigid-minded about poetry having to have FORM and that freeform poetry was just prose you'd put weird line breaks into, so that also cut out my ability to connect with a lot of good poetry. (I mean....I will admit I still do kiiiiinda think that it's just prose with extra line breaks, I just don't think that that's a problem anymore))

Service's poetry, at its best, is snappy and satisfying, easy to follow, tells a story or says something interesting or funny, and has a good flow. A good poet to ease a poetry-dubious person into liking some poetry. Not all his poetry is him at his best, though, and at his worst he can be trite, sexist, racist, annoying, or tedious.

My bookshelf has over the years sprouted various books of Service's poetry, including this one. (There's multiple collections out there called The Best of Robert Service, btw, so for the sake of clarity: I'm talking about the 2001 McGraw-Hill Ryerson one.) Of course, even a "best of" collection won't necessarily remove the unlikeable elements of a poet's oeuvre, since the tastes of the editor will inevitably drive what's included.

So I like some of the poems in this collection, am mildly ok with others, and actively dislike a bunch more. So it goes! These days I don't consider Service my favourite poet as I would have when I was a kid/teen, but I still have a good deal of lingering fondness for him, despite his issues.