Paulette Jiles' Waterloo Express is made up of blues, shouts and meditations at the razor's edge. It's a sometimes electrifying fusion of folk and sophistication. The author is often presented in folk outline: she laments a string of busted love affairs, hits the road again and again to forget, and can talk as sardonic and lowdown as any blues momma. Yet the TNT and agony she drags around come crackling out in images of manic brilliance, controlled by a frequently superb ear. Jiles moves through the imaginative terrain of Plath, Atwood, perhaps Neruda, as naturally as through Bessie Smith, Kitty Wells, Joplin.

The poems go from hillbilly country in the United States to Toronto, then halfway round the world in an outside attempt to ditch the blues, then back to Canada. The round-the-world section is the least successful for me; too many poems consist of a series of...