Processional is Anne Compton's second book of poems, the follow-up to her widely-acclaimed, award-winning debut, Opening the Island.

Here Compton is at the head of a poetic procession, a guide leading readers through a house affected by both daily life and the extraordinary - stopping only to take in the change of seasons and prepare the outside yard for it. With one breath, she tells of life and death, with the next, play and metaphysics, joy and heartbreak. She is a guide like no other, accomplished and versatile, leading by example and from a distance at the same time.

Anne Compton
Is a two-time winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize and winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry for her second collection, Processional. In 2008, she was awarded the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English Language Literary Arts. A former teacher and writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick at Saint John, she developed and directed the acclaimed Lorenzo Reading Series.

"[Compton's] poems and prose-poems provoke and stimulate thinking about where the boundaries between experience, observation, perception, expression, and communication might lie."
— PN Review

"Her writing points to a persistent, saving grace, a lyric remainder — given 'the small manoeuvres left us now' — that can still find its way somehow into these moving, finely made poems.
— Event

Anne Compton's profile page

"A warm collection, as Compton uses the architectural details of home and heart to evoke presences now gone."
- Winnipeg Free Press

"Compton, whose first collection, Opening the Island, won the Atlantic Poetry Prize, returns with a rigorously intelligent work about the pains and glories of life and nature."
- The Globe and Mail

"[Anne Compton has not only proven herself to be an important Maritime writer, but has sealed her reputation as having an integral voice in Canadian literature. As with Opening the Island, she has outdone herself by creating a followup in Processional that leads readers through a house sharing her interpretation of the daily grinds of living, loving and dying while pausing to reflect on the changing of the seasons. Veteran lovers of poetry will enjoy this book in its entirety. To novices, I would seriously recommend Processional. They will be enlightened, entertained and educated beyond their expectation."
- The Daily Gleaner

"She is scholarly and elegant, her spine straight as an English schoolteacher's; she slouches in her chair and orders a beer with the gusto and relief of a working man. the poetry she writes hides layer upon layer of meaning; she is open and direct, asking as many questions as she, well, evades. She is sharp, she is ruthless; she is kind and always, always, hospitable. Compton's language is like the poet herself, spare but beautiful, inviting you to take a closer look, to see what might lie behind the simple facade."
- New Brunswick Telegraph Journal