Ken Belford is an eco-poet who examines the archtypically Canadian conflict between developement and preservation. The sharp social commentary of his work establishes British Columbia's northern Interior as the battlefront. Though he generally favours preservation, Belford varies his perspective from poem to poem to capture the full spectrum of the conflict.

In many of the poems, Belford struggles with how his way of life implicates him in something about which we should all feel guilty. The food he eats, the house he dwells in and the oil that keeps him warm are all products of industries that destroying destroying natural habitat. Without being theoretical, the unified consciousness of this collection portrays all the raw emotions and frustrations within the contemporary environmental debate. Belford's personal divisiveness is representative of a much larger social division that incorporates us all.

Ken Belford
Ken Belford, the “self-educatedLan(d)guage” poet, has said that living for decades in the “back country” has afforded him a unique relationship to language that rejects the colonial impulse to write about nature but attempts to write from nature and our relationship to the land.

Currently living in Prince George, BC, he continues to write outside the boundaries of the conventional forms espoused by what he calls the “tribal schools” of poetry. His six previous books of poetry are Fireweed, The Post Electric Caveman, Pathways into the Mountains, lan(d)guage, when snakes awaken and Ecologue.

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