These flies on a white table burst
into shafts of light and touch down
again, sun-stricken,
the oil of their bodies breaking
light into all its parts.

Not yet song, their buzzing proves
less than noise, maybe more,
horizon note or beginnings
of pattern.

It suits me to think they have learned
to make much of the nothing
their lives amount to.

What are you thinking?

from "Flies: A Few Questions"

Poised and buoyant, musing among ironies; alive to the psychologies of weather, night noises, mowing the lawn and putting it off; knowing the many mindscapes of neighbourhood, detecting the places where myth surfaces into a backyard or long weekend, where a situation teeters on the brink of art and "imagined creatures are making / real connections" - what is Closer To Home is domestic life that has been given back its dance, the bite and mystery that both provokes and eludes the grasp of the mind.

Derk Wynand was born in Bad Suderode, Germany, in 1944, not quite a week after D-Day. He arrived in Vancouver with his mother and brother in the fall of 1952, half a year after his father had come to Canada to establish a new life for himself and his family. After receiving his BA in English and philosophy from the University of British Columbia in 1966, Wynand taught for the Berlitz School of Languages in Montreal and Drummondville before returning to complete an MA In creative writing at UBC in 1969, where he studied with J. Michael Yates and Michael Bullock. While there, he began to translate the works of H.C. Artmann and others, a practice he continued during his time at the University of Victoria, where he taught from 1969 to 2004, serving two terms as chair of the Department of Writing and working in many capacities for The Malahat Review, including as editor from 1992 to 1998. Soon after he started teaching at UVic, he met his future wife, Eva, who provided the impetus for much of the work that followed, collected in eight books and three chapbooks of poetry, and in an experimental novel. He lives in Victoria, BC.

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