In Learning to Count, Douglas Burnet Smith explores the counterpoint between everyday, often innocent, experiences and the darker elegiac tones of history. The lyricism of Tuscany’s sublime skies merges into J.M.W. Turner’s obsession with clouds and the author’s own retracing of Turner’s sources of inspiration. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Louis Riel, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Benito Mussolini, Robert Desnos, Napoleon and a contemplative lizard on a Corsican mountainside all have their roles to play.

In brutal contrast, the author, taking his own child to a school in France, encounters horrifying evidence of the murder of hundreds of children by French Nazi collaborators. But throughout, Smith measures the impact of his encounters with distinctly Canadian insight and awareness. And so finally the journey returns home, to Canada, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Pablo Picasso magically leads a naked chorus line through the streets of the city. The journey has been exhilarating, exhausting, at times almost unbearable – but always, always magical.

Douglas Burnet Smith (1949) has served as President of the League of Canadian Poets and of the Public Lending Right Commission of Canada. He teaches at St. Francis Xavier University. Smith was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1993 for Voices from a Farther Room (1992) and for the Atlantic Poetry Prize for his most recent collection, The Killed (2000).

Douglas Burnet-Smith's profile page

• Short-listed, Atlantic Poetry Prize