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The poems here were written in my early 20s.

One of the best teachers I ever had (including Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan) was David McKeen, DLitt (Oxon) who was a wonderfully learned and generous man.

He wrote me in 1970, of the first poem of those below. “[This] is a real triumph, by far your best […] it states directly what is implicit in the fact that you write such verbally subtle poetry as you do.” This poem was one of a group of 15 I submitted to Prof. McKeen. He liked four. The first three following are of those four.

Prof. McKeen’s was the first praise I received for my poetry.

What’s below are scanned from typescript pages made on an early 20th C. Royal and, later, on a 1972 Olympia. The Royal was a stubborn beast formerly owned by a Col. of the garrison of Quebec City, and it shared with him, I’ve always believed, some of his upright heft. I never liked the squareness of the Olympia’s typeface, but it’s price ($150.) and newness sold it to me in ’72. Why not re-key/type the poems? They wouldn’t be the same.

What brio she had! To be a go her craft shop needed more customer traffic than could be expected even of the later 1970s in what was then a village in southwestern Ontario. But it had no shortage of stuff, and of her open-hearted bubbling person, her lovely eyes, her laughter.

My dad, having no father to speak of, was raised by his mother and maiden aunts, who gave him drive enough to work his way through McGill in the 1920s and become a combustion engineer, and the good manners and formal anxieties of his class and time. He was a handsome young man when Montréal’s Ritz-Carleton was a  rising young hotel. He later worked for big oil in western Canada.

My wife Terri’s maternal roots go deep in the rich farmland north of Toronto. Her beloved “Granny” had a house in Bradford where she often nurtured Terri after her mother died when she was 11. I never saw the inside of the house but Terri’s telling of its and related family lore ignited my imagination.