In the spring of 2018, Brian Bartlett embarked on an experiment of going outdoors before sunrise to find what could be seen, heard, felt and thought in the days' earlier hours. Composed of entries drafted over 18 months, Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal combines nature writing, travel, autobiography and reflections on reading. During in-the-field excursions Bartlett found more to learn about dawn, sunrise and morning than he'd imagined; in his reading he encountered morning thoughts by many sorts of writers, including naturalists, poets, painters, religious figures and translators from oral traditions.
Following in the footsteps of his earlier plein-air work, Branches Over Ripples: A Waterside Journal, Bartlett's new book is characterized by close observation, a curious mind and a love for meandering. Bartlett is keen both to record the unique textures of particular mornings and to muse on how mornings overlap with each other. His layered prose is open to both concentration and digressiveness, poetry and science, memory and mindfulness, grief and humour. Aging, mortality and climate change are realities the author faces even while he observes and celebrates birds and other creatures, flowers and other plants, clouds and sunlight.
More than half of the journal's entries were written in and about sites in Nova Scotia (including Halifax, Colchester, Lunenburg, Hants, Kings and Digby counties). Bartlett's travels also take him to other locations in the Atlantic Provinces, as well as to Maine, Montreal and Vancouver, southern Sweden and northern California.

As a high-school student, Brian Bartlett was invited to join the Ice House Gang, so-called because they met in the University of New Brunswick's historic Ice House every Tuesday night to read their poetry and hone their talents. Amazed and delighted by Bartlett's gift for words, Robert Gibbs, Bill Bauer, Kent Thompson, and Alden Nowlan inspired him to become the accomplished artist he is today. He published his chapbook Finches for the Wake when he was only 18 years old. The next year, Brother's Insomnia was published as a New Brunswick Chapbook. Since this apprenticeship period, Bartlett has published six highly acclaimed collections: Cattail Week, Planet Harbor, Underwater Carpentry, Granite Erratics, The Afterlife of Trees, and Wanting the Day. His poetry has won Two Malahat Review Long Poem prizes, a fellowship to the Hawthornden Castle International Writers' Retreat in Scotland, and first prize in the 2000 Petra Kenney poetry awards. A talented writer of prose, Bartlett's essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in Books in Canada, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, and Brick, as well as Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Anthology. A native of Fredericton, New Brunswick, Bartlett spent 15 years in Montreal, studying at McGill and teaching at Concordia. Today, he teaches creative writing and literature at Saint Mary's University in Halifax.

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