Some poets are famously indefinable - Walt Whitman springs to mind. He obeyed no rule in the writing of poetry, and few in the way he lived his life. He was responsible for some dreadful lines - Yet he is completely, utterly and unmistakably a poet, as securely planted in his poetic nature as an ant is in its ant-ness.

The poetry of Bermuda's Denise DeMoura is like that - disobedient, incapable of easy classification. Despite that, it obviously springs from genuinely poetic roots.

Ms DeMoura's life seems as hard to classify as her poetry - she calls herself The Poet Hitch Hiker and spends time in Halifax, Nova Scotia. One senses she takes pride in her unconventionality.

At the end of the very short foreword to her collection of poems, , published in 2002 by a Canadian company, Broken Jaw Press of Frederickton, she writes "There seems to be a fundamental difference between those who accept the world as it is - and those who question it." The same sentence, broken into four lines, is repeated later in the book as a poem, complete in itself, entitled . Iambic pentameter it ain't, but if being a view held passionately qualifies it as poetry, then poem it is.

Ms DeMoura writes some of her poetry as if she were distilling personal history coaxed from her on an analyst's couch into an overproof emotional essence. In the earlier poems in the book, she reveals that she was abused by an alcoholic father, and writes of an inner scream that:

.

In the very next poem, perhaps in answer to a rhetorical question about why she hitchhikes, she expresses a less turbulent view of the fruits of abuse. But it is an answer that also has the sort of power to chill that you might expect of a poem about, say, grave robbery:

Later, she borrows a Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry line, to introduce a couple of short stanzas that are angry, but that nonetheless seem to chuckle a little at their own exaggerated potential for violence:

There are, in Ms Demoura's poetry, bits that don't work, that have all the clunk of one of Whitman's worst-conceived declarations. This seems to me an example:.

And yet, like Whitman's words, hers escape seeming to have simply been carelessly chosen. Awkward they might be, even mawkish, but they are also so personal and so obviously risen from the depths of her that they have acquired a dignity and moral authority that turns criticism aside.

There are also lines in this collection that that have a touch of the grace of something from Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath, both of whom also wrote in this kind of "confessional" style:

I enjoyed reading this little volume. I admired Ms DeMoura's courage in speaking so honestly about some very personal, painful experiences. It is pleasant to know that there is a Bermudian who wants to lead an unconventional life. And it is pleasant to know there is a Bermudian who understands that poetry is more than a regurgitation of tawdry clich?s about pink sand and azure sea.

April is Poetry Month in the United States, a custom started by the American Association of Poets in 1997. It seems a good time to urge Ms DeMoura to keep feeding and watering her poet-ness. And perhaps a good time to offer two little suggestions that might help her along.

First, the work of any writer is to express human experience in language whose connotative or emotional charge is matched to that of the impulse to write. Understanding how to do that comes most easily from spending a lot of time with really good poetry, which is often not the same as fashionable poetry, and the Oxford Dictionary.

Second, I know it sounds a little odd, but it is true that rules are the most profoundly liberating things. Using classic poetic form and metre might give Ms DeMoura's powers of expression new muscle that would surprise her.

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