Exciting news for me is that Thistledown Press of Saskatoon has accepted for publication in spring 2017 my new themed poetry collection, Helpless Angels: A Book of Music. Many of the poems in the volume previously appeared in such magazines as The Hudson Review, Queen’s Quarterly, Arc, Prairie Fire, and the website Poetry Daily.

Mine was the first generation in human history to be able to listen anyplace to our own choice of music. Helpless Angels explores some ways this fact has affected our personal, social and political lives; another focus is the musics of the natural world. The book includes poems that are themselves song-like, and poems that speak to the effectiveness or lack thereof of any art form in the face of the death of people important to us. Rock and roll, folk, labour hymns, pop, classical… Helpless Angels honours the songs and song-makers who have functioned for me, as the book’s Introduction says, as “solace, inspiration, escape, memory-jogger.”