Thirty-five years after the publication of his first book, Peter Trower has brought together his finest poems for the beautiful, thorough and definitive volume Haunted Hills and Hanging Valleys.

From whistle punk to smelter worker to faller to crane operator, Trower worked up and down the West Coast for 22 years collecting the stories and soaking in the vivid imagery and personalities that would characterize much of his perceptively crafted, musical poetry. Haunted Hills and Hanging Valleys presents for the first time the best work of a writing career that has drawn Trower praise as "the poet laureate of this mountain kingdom" from Al Purdy and for "heft and passion and a gift for telling place and detail" from Irving Layton. This long-awaited book will confirm Trower's place as one of our country's most important poets.

Peter Trower was born at St. Leonard's-on-Sea, England, in 1930. He immigrated to British Columbia at age ten, following the death of his test-pilot father in a plane crash. His mother married a West Coast pulp mill superintendent who drowned soon after. Trower quit school to work as a logger for twenty-two years. Since 1969, he has published more than a dozen books of poetry--from which poems were selected for Haunted Hills & Hanging Valleys: Selected Poems 1969-2004--and contributed to several issues of Raincoast Chronicles and Vancouver Magazine. Poetry collections such as Moving Through Mystery (1969), Between the Sky and the Splinters (1974), The Alders and Others (1969) and Ragged Horizons (1978) express his admiration and resentment at the magisterial power of nature. He has written three novels about the West Coast logging life: Grogan's Cafe (1993), Dead Man's Ticket (1996) and The Judas Hills (2000). In 2002, Trower was awarded the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award and had his name added to the BC Writers' Walk of Fame outside the Vancouver Public Library in recognition of his contribution to BC literature. He lives in North Vancouver, British Columbia with his faithful cat, Hangup.

Peter Trower's profile page

Don McKay has published numerous books of poetry, including Birding, or desire (1983), Night Field (1991), Apparatus (1997), Another Gravity (2000), Strike/Slip (2006), The Muskwa Assemblage (2008), and Paradoxides (2012). He won the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2007, two Governor General's Awards for Poetry (in 1991 and 2000), a National Magazine Award in 1991, the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Poetry (in 1983 and 2013), and the E.J. Pratt Poetry Award in 2013. His books have also appeared on the shortlists for the Governor General's Award for Non-fiction (in 2002), the Governor General's Award for Poetry (in 1983 and 1997), and the Griffin Poetry Prize (in 2001 and 2005). He was named to the Order of Canada in 2009

McKay is also a respected editor, teacher, and scholar. He has taught at the University of Western Ontario, the University of New Brunswick, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Sage Hill Writing Experience. He has served as editor and co-publisher of Brick Books since 1975, and from 1991 to 1996, he edited The Fiddlehead. He presently lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.

Don McKay's profile page

"Peter Trower, though not well known east of BC, is one of our most potent poets still writing. His obscurity can be blamed largely on being pigeonholed as a "logger poet" (Trower toiled twenty-two years in the woods and in a variety of other industrial jobs). This does justice neither to Trower's talent and range, nor to the inherent drama and worth of his subjects. Trower integrates traditions of popular balladry (especially the rhymes of Robert Swanson), savvy knowledge of modernist poetics, atavistic Anglo-Saxon proclivities for alliteration and compound metaphors, and all the strange diction of the logging camp into a poetry that is smart, gutsy (often gut-wrenching) and elegiac. A selection of his best work from 1969 to the present is now conveniently available in one volume: Haunted Hills and Hanging Valleys. This book should establish Trower as the king-feller of Canadian letters that he is."
-Zach Wells, Maisonneuve Magazine

<i>Maisonneuve</i> Magazine Review

"...one thing is clear: this book really is striking a nerve with poets everywhere... Trower's poems, as capricious and harrowing as they can be (men maimed, alcoholism, dead dreams, dire regret), have an internally consistent language, a bunkhouse vernacular that he wrests beauty from... They're tough poems, vigorous poems, angry poems, hard poems, tender but unsentimental poems, poems that, though short in line length, are mighty in terms of effect... This is a very necessary poet."
- Shane Neilson, ARC

ARC

"It's high time [Trower] was recognized more widely as the gifted and versatile force in Canadian poetry that he is. If this fine selection can't garner such recognition, it's hard to imagine what will."
-Zachariah WellsThe Danforth Review

Danforth