Description
One of the great privileges of running a literary publishing house is that of working with particular writers over time, helping them to shape their voice and vision and to foster a readership. One such writer intrinsically associated with Gaspereau Press is the poet and essayist Peter Sanger. Building on the themes of his 2006 collection Aiken Drum, Sanger’s new volume of poems takes its title from the subject of an engraving by Newfoundland printmaker David Blackwooda simple wooden horse carved by a Cape Freels man in 1907 as a gift for his grandson. In the figure of John Stokes’ horse, Sanger locates an imaginative gesture requiring the suspension of disbelief, for child and adult alikea winged mount into a world where myth and memory mix. Looking at language, memory and art through the lens of language presents the very sort of riddle on which Sanger’s poetics thrive. As well as the title sequence, the book features a section composed of object poems (“Fishing for Jade”) generally expressing a preoccupation with lightshadows and reflections, signals, moon, waterand a more topical section (“Civics”) which assails the present state of public discourse in a tone and cadence reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s great modernist poem, The Waste Land. The book also includes a short essay (“Leaping Time”) which combines memories, childhood books and equine lore to provide a sort of mirror to John Stokes’ horse. These poems evoke, in Sanger’s words, “imagination’s creative energy, immanent in time and yet timeless, evidence of love, devotion and patience, evidence that by seeing art through its eyes we see more clearly through our own.”
About the author
Raised in Ontario, Peter Sanger (1943) was born in Worcestershire, England, and was for twenty-six years a professor at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College in Truro. An editor of The Antigonish Review, Sanger also edited John Thompson: Collected Poems and Translations (1995). He founded the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia. His books on poetry include SeaRun: Notes on John Thompson's "Stilt Jack" (1986) and "Her kindled shadow . . .": An Introduction to the Work of Richard Outram (2001, 2002). A collection of essays, Spar: Words in Place, was published by Gaspereau Press in 2002.
Other titles by
Sea Run
Notes on John Thompson’s Stilt Jack
Odysseus Asleep
Uncollected Sequences, 1994-2019
Lightfield: The Photography of Thaddeus Holownia
The Nature of Nature
The Photographs of Thaddeus Holownia 1976-2016
Of Things Unknown
Critical Essays, 19782005
Oikos
Fireship
Early Poems, 19651991
Through Darkling Air
The Poetry of Richard Outram
The Stone Canoe
Two Lost Mi’kmaq Texts
