Greene is from St. John’s but got tenure on the mainland, so every trip home is hijacked by childhood memories, many of which clash with St. John’s oil money makeover. Once-slummy rowhouses are today listed as exceptional downtown residences. But these poems are too smart for newfie nostalgia or for getting sentimental about US history. Greene points out that Civil War monuments memorialize a fight that isn’t dead, even if the cemeteries are full. Is anywhere unhaunted? The number of refugees drowned trying to reach Italy hangs over the Rialto in Venice, mostly ignored. One shopper is too busy being ruffled by the new appearance of Brown people running one of the fruit stands. The hypocrisy could make you sick.

And so sickness is a recurring theme in Cannibal Rats: Greene writes about ailing friends, his mother’s last days, and his own cancer diagnosis (“I know my fate/will hang on dispatches from my prostate”) but the maladies always lead us to compassion for those facing monumental disasters like “the public pain/of massacres in Sudan and Ukraine.” In each case, the witness is quite helpless. International news is the agonizing pea under my own twenty mattresses and I have to admire Greene’s attitude, even if it isn’t a cure:

                  It doesn’t really change
anything to visit a mountain range 
or a battlefield, to be a student 
of catastrophe—always the moment
remains and we bear it because we must.
And what then of the approach to trust
or the new stirrings of praise? At best, a shift
in how my eye falls but I’ll count that a gift

The major poems are written in heroic couplets, a frankly insane move in a contemporary poem, especially one that goes for nearly 40 pages, like “The Reenactors.” Rhyming pentameter peaked by the early 1700s. It’s a testament to Greene’s skill that the lines never feel archaic or stiff. Sure, I wondered if he only chose “bivouac” because it rhymes with “unpack,” but I’m willing to cut him some slack (haha) if that’s what he had to do to make these couplets work. It turns out the form is brilliant for poems trying for “a sense of proportion.” Heroic couplets are probably best known for epic satires and satirical epics, and by inflating and deflating its subjects, the most famous examples explore how flirts and kings ought to fit into society. Greene is doing something similar in the way he puts personal afflictions in relation to the great swaths of suffering circling the planet.

Readers from town will likely recognize the cannibal rats as the last travelers aboard the Lyubov Orlova, the cruise ship left to rot in the St. John’s harbour from 2010 to 2013, then towed out to international waters and cut loose. By now it might have sunk, that is, “joined all that history of drowned fleets/without song or poem but a million tweets.” Of course, the Lyubov Orlova does get its poem in the end, courtesy of Greene. You can read a metaphor into that if you want. Either way, the fact is after decades of expeditions, the ship ended up lost.