There is something about the bleakness and epic geographical scale of the Canadian North that arrests the collective imagination – something to do with our romanticized notions of survival in inhospitable climes, our respect (though we have a strange way of showing it) for the northern First Nations tribes, our profound awe at the grandeur of the vast alien landscape.

Clea Roberts is so enchanted with the physical and intellectual landscape of the North that she has set her first poetry collection there. Here Is Where We Disembark is divided into two sections, the first comprising lyrics on life in the Yukon and northern B.C., the second concerned with the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 19th century.

Her spare, image-driven lines and Zen-like incorporation of natural elements (which often lead to metaphysical, quasi-spiritual revelations: “The last light the residue / of a million years’ journey / has been creeping / toward me, always”) show the influence of Chinese and Japanese verse, and are reminiscent of John Thompson’s poetry.

Unfortunately, Roberts often offers pretty-sounding faux profundities instead of substance. Falling snow, for example, is described as “filling in the yard’s / grey and brown truths / with explanation / of eider and light.” Her metaphors can be equally disappointing. Drifting sheets of snow are, predictably, “armfuls of transient, / white veil”; a blue bird is “a piece of ribbon / cut from the sky.”

Despite these failings, there’s an appeal to Roberts’ work, to the quietude of her vision, to her shorthand rendering of complexity. In “The necessary element of hunger,” for instance, “it’s not us, it’s our hunger / that erects the fence post, swings the gate closed” to keep the cows in. Animal husbandry is here reduced to primal survival instinct.

This is not poetry of grand rhetorical gestures or verbal pyrotechnics. It is an act of quiet contemplation, a meditation on the natural world, and on a way of existing in it. As such, Roberts belongs to a Canadian pastoral tradition wherein nature, while awesome in its majesty (and deserving of poetic exaltation), has teeth to be reckoned with.