John Hartley Williams

Canada John Hartley Williams

In Canada, poems arrive out of the ether like the fabled, lantern-jawed Mountie coming to the rescue out of nowhere. Others are on their way back into the ether, transmissions from the brain of an uneasy redman. These are poems that make you feel the hairs on a pony's neck. Canada opens in the backwoods of autobiography and narrative, then reports crisply on calls of sex and desire.

After crossing the frontier, a final movement blows innocence off the map for good and all.