The opening image of a burning guitar factory establishes the strange convergences that underline Harmonics as a whole. In the opening ``Late Rain`` the reader is forced to consider the binaries of destruction and creation: while the ``skewed frets`` and ``yawed necks`` smoulder, the surrounding trees create tones of their own and the narrator progresses through a waterlogged set of chords, singing and rising above the suburbs and industrial park. Immediately, there is something transcendent about music that echoes throughout the work as a whole, revealing itself as a function of rebirth and re-exploration, ultimately providing a fulcrum point to the various tensions the poems explore.

The most obvious place of regeneration is in many of the forms Ferguson chooses. The book is littered with villanelles (``A vindication of the flight of seagulls``), ghazals (``February Ghazal``), and odes (“Dirge”). Further, the poems borrow lines and epigraphs from authors such as Ovid. While the back-cover copy promotes this as “infusing age-old forms with...a unique and fresh aesthetic energy,” it is more complicated than that. Paralleling with the music imagery, the use of traditional forms of poetry creates an interesting ahistorical treatment, a reverence that does as much to redefine as it does pay tribute to these forms. Like an old blues progression, Ferguson argues that these forms are still relevant, that they don’t need anything as precious as “infusing.” These poems tend to be the strongest ones of the collection because the narrator is forced away from the singular perspective and comes to rely more heavily on the strong description and imagery that the strongest poems build their spine from. ``A vindication of the flight of seagulls,” for instance, hinges on “pterosaur tonal” and “flays with squawking scalpel the morning’s lull.”

It is this repeated attention to description and metaphor in poems that will keep most readers interested. The poems in Harmonics do a good job balancing the strong hand of scene with sound. In “White China” the narrator describes “two handfuls of surrounding snow,/ could bring them to boil over a coil/” – this type of imagery is consistent and effective. The scooping of snow, the cold, the rawness of the hands, is implied by the economy of the first quoted line; the rhyme, though a bit too full, underlines the work’s commitment to musicality.

However, the next two lines, “of unimaginable redness and transfer/ the lot to my mother’s white china teapot”, highlight some of the issues with the text. Often the reader is asking for the metaphor and description to push further – “unimaginable redness” is a cop-out, an overly- vague phrase that dilutes the previous lines; likewise “white china teapot” could be nudged further to be more evocative. The best poems are ones like “Pangaea” that filter the description through a premise, allow the description to be focused by an over-arching idea or concept (or often form).

Too often though the poems drift from focused and compact description and indulge in a repetitive use of the “I” to propel the works. As a result, after reading the first twenty pages, the poems begin to look and sound somewhat similar: based around the individual, hard-fought epiphany, with similar vocabulary, tone and line structure. Poems such as “Usual Blue” and “Hex,” while discussing different content, still rely on the direct address (“you”) and carry similar vocabulary, form and line breaks. Elsewhere, poems such as “Carillon” and “Eastern Ontario Pastoral” do change the pace effectively but even these rely on a narrative pontificating that grows a bit tiring.

Still, the moments of description and purposeful echoing, like “Pre-Ocean,” make parts of this collection worthwhile. It is in those spaces that Ferguson best harnesses a harmony between place and sound, landscape and music.