Present and past collide in Marc Plourde’s poems, which sketch out a multifaceted portrait of his home territory over a period of half a century. Set in rural Quebec and Montreal, Park Extension’s immigrant streets, College Notre Dame in the 1960s, McGill Ghetto’s bohemia of the 1970s and the city’s changing downtown core, they focus on family, neighbours, and strangers, seen through the eyes of a sometimes bemused but compassionate observer of the human drama.

Born in Montreal in 1951 to English and French Canadian parents, MARC PLOURDE spoke mostly English as a child at home, but was schooled in French. His first poems were written and published in French before he was seventeen, but thereafter he began writing in English, strongly influenced by Alden Nowlan and others (at nineteen he made a solo pilgrimage to New Brunswick specifically to meet Nowlan.) Traces of a French sensibility nevertheless colour his poems, which are preoccupied with people and the places they inhabit. Plourde's gifts were recognized early on: a first collection of poems, Touchings, was published by Fred Cogswell's Fiddlehead Poetry Books in 1970, followed by The White Magnet (poems, stories, and a one-act play) with D.C. Books in 1973, and a collection of stories, The Spark Plug Thief, in 1976. Thereafter the poet fell silent for two decades, turning instead to translating Quebecois writers, notably Gaston Miron, whose selected poems, Embers and Earth, he co-tran

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