This collection of Bruce Fraser's poetry is wide in scope and intimate in tone. It gathers together love poems and elegies, family portraits and philosophical reflections, meditations on trees, compost heaps, legal cases, and sacred texts. Some poems unfold with warmth and humour, while others reach for something more contemplative. The range of forms is broad, but the sensibility is constant. It is curious, affectionate, sometimes mischievous, and always emotionally sincere. What emerges is a layered accumulation of voices, moods, and memories stitched together by love and persistence.
What holds these poems together is emotional honesty, a desire to honour what has mattered and to preserve it in language. These poems are for those who are gone, and for those who remain. They speak to anyone who has tried to name what feels inexpressible, and to those who keep returning to memory not for answers, but in search of connection.
More than anything, this collection stands as a testament to the act of writing. It trusts that what we remember, we keep alive by telling. And perhaps what endures longest is the voice that continues to speak with care and conviction.
- from the Introduction by Rebecca Sheppard, PhD Literature, University of British Columbia