John Donlan’s lyric work seeks the connection between lives—not just the life of a coyote and the life of a man, or the peaceful cacophony of a pond in summer and the life of the human listener—but between the life before birth, and the life after. He reveals the wilderness to us moment by moment, while simultaneously driving us back into our own nature—a process readers, lifted by Donlan’s imagery, rhythms, and insights, can only experience as pure pleasure. Here beauty is the engine that enspirits the mind, freeing us from contemporary despair and the illusion we’ve left nature behind. Devil’s Paintbrush. In my slow-burning archive orange hawkweed thrives in granite-charactered soil spalled off the basement stone, a beaver labours up her steep skid road logging poplar for food and shelter, wind drives rivers of ripples down a pond. Everything here knows what to do. I investigate every valve, work and rework notes to husks, skeletal remains, survivors who revive experience. I try to memorize, to make some pictures to walk into, in the final time when I can’t walk or hear or see, and see lake-cradling pink granite, its orange earth, its skin of lives flickering, flickering.

John Donlan is the author of six collections of poetry. He is an editor with Brick Books, and was the 2012–13 Barbara Moon Editorial Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto, the 2014–15 Writer in Residence at Saskatoon Public Library, and the 2016–17 Haig-Brown Writer in Residence in Campbell River. He divides his time between Vancouver, B.C., and South Frontenac, Ontario. Visit John’s website at www.johndonlan.wordpress.com.

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