After fifty years of writing, my archive of poems numbers in the hundreds and continues to expand. I recently published Paper Black Leaf with John Aylen Books, a selection of poems from my first three decades of writing. I anticipate publishing a second collection of shorter poems in 2027 and a collection of poetic sequences a year later.
Every three weeks or so you’ll find a short new selection here from Paper Black Leaf. I hope the poems appeal to you and that you’ll want to come back for more. Whatever your clicks from here on in, thanks for the visit.
Great news! Paper Black Leaf is now available from Paragraph Books on McGill College Avenue in downtown Montreal. Ask for it by name!
More great news: we’ll have a book launch and poetry reading for Paper Black Leaf on Tuesday, October 27th, at 5:00 p.m. at the Word Bookstore, 469 Milton, just east of the McGill campus here in Montreal. Hope to see you there!
Note to mobile readers: best to read the poems in landscape format, so longer lines don’t break in two.
Some landscapes
The poems:
after the impressionists
grey (rumble
sun through
orange overhead
last (evening
in the harbour
ships (blurred
over wharves
fire is
somewhere in the
losing of
clouds (drums
building over
the background
a slow
city (dim
slow breeze
before the night)
flutes
Relic
a long red hair
I gave it to the wind
but over the lake it drifted
without dimpling
the dark surface
towards the far shore
the first spill of light
from the sun rising behind me
after several hundred yards
I lost the thought of you
but carry you more
than I knew to this place
where the rhythms
of green hillscape opposite
call only vaguely to mind
your sleeping body
the tangle of your calves and knees
and most the rising
swell of your hip
beneath your single sheet
your arms and breasts
in mutual protection
and that mountainside meadow
sombre as your sleeping forehead
turned aside
in its mass of hair
from Faith
this is impossible now
to stand here in the last sunlight
the wheat darkening around my hips
the flats growing
and the low whistle
of the silence
the car a hundred yards away
in the distance only the sure line
of the circular horizon
to stand with the Albertan breeze
bothering my hair
and to forget Hulme and free verse
I swore I would share the silence
but the mind has been taken from its own ground