The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh covers the range of love, loss and learning that have made rob mclennan one of the most exciting young poets in Canada. The language of the poems, though thoroughly grounded in the media culture of television and film, casts a deceptively familiar veil over the breadth and depth of reading which inform this work—from the seventeenth century platonist mystics to what his companions on the poetry trail were writing at last night’s soirée, a crowd of voices, asides, references, allusions and whispers is constantly pushing and expanding his line forward. marvellously self-taught in the school of poets, mclennan’s work is refreshingly free of pretence and category. The impressive and exhaustive range of poets and writers with whom he has learned is simply there, in his work-present, in the current text, not absent in some far, or even near, distant past. This is the work of a young man who has paid his dues and done his homework. There is also a kind of subtle humour here, born of the care with which mclennan keeps his lines clear of the dead-ends of self-consciousness, allowing the language to free itself from the page, and to be heard as well as read.

Born in Ottawa in 1970 at the late lamented Grace Hospital on Wellington Street near Parkdale Avenue, rob mclennan currently lives in directly between Ottawa`s Chinatown and Little Italy neighbourhoods, and was called "Centretown`s poet laureate" by David Gladstone in The Centretown Buzz in the mid-1990s. The author of twelve previous trade poetry collections in Canada and England, he has published poetry, fiction, interviews, reviews and columns in over two hundred publications in fourteen countries and in four languages, and done reading tours in five countries on two continents. The editor/publisher of above/ground press and the long poem magazine STANZAS (both founded in 1993), the online critical journal Poetics.ca (with Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell) and the Ottawa poetry annual ottawater (ottawater.com), he edits the ongoing Cauldron Books series through Broken Jaw Press, edited the anthologies Evergreen: six new poets (Black Moss Press), side/lines: a new canadian poetics (Insomniac Press), GROUNDSWELL: the best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press) and Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (Chaudiere Books), and runs the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair, which he co-founded in 1994, currently under the umbrella of the small press action network - ottawa (span-o), which he also runs. Fall 2007 sees the appearance of a new poetry collection with Ireland`s Salmon Publishing, a collection of literary essays appears with Toronto`s ECW Press, and a title for Vancouver publisher Arsenal Pulp Press, Ottawa: The Unknown City. His online home is at www.track0.com/rob_mclennan, and he often posts reviews, essays, rants and other nonsense at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com.

rob mclennan's profile page

• Short-listed, Archibald Lampman Poetry Award

“Just the right combination of details … carefully crafted, each line shifting the image slightly … “
— Books in Canada