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“Fearless and direct, tender and loving — the marriage of these forces is electric. In Joetry, Mendelson Joe fixes his gaze on the beauty in people, nature, work, love, deeds, words, and accountability — the often unheralded, everyday stuff of life. He is casting a wide net, trying to reach us all, telling us clearly: appreciate what is good and beautiful, do the right things, stop doing the wrong things, laugh, create, speak up, sing, love, and respect the earth and one another. Oh, one more thing: revere women — they are our best hope for the future of life on the planet.” — Gwen Swick, from the foreword to Joetry.

One of the great privileges of running a literary publishing house is that of working with particular writers over time, helping them to shape their voice and vision and to foster a readership. One such writer intrinsically associated with Gaspereau Press is the poet and essayist Peter Sanger. Building on the themes of his 2006 collection Aiken Drum, Sanger’s new volume of poems takes its title from the subject of an engraving by Newfoundland printmaker David Blackwood–a simple wooden horse carved by a Cape Freels man in 1907 as a gift for his grandson. In the figure of John Stokes’ horse, Sanger locates an imaginative gesture requiring the suspension of disbelief, for child and adult alike–a winged mount into a world where myth and memory mix. Looking at language, memory and art through the lens of language presents the very sort of riddle on which Sanger’s poetics thrive. As well as the title sequence, the book features a section composed of object poems (“Fishing for Jade”) generally expressing a preoccupation with light–shadows and reflections, signals, moon, water–and a more topical section (“Civics”) which assails the present state of public discourse in a tone and cadence reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s great modernist poem, The Waste Land. The book also includes a short essay (“Leaping Time”) which combines memories, childhood books and equine lore to provide a sort of mirror to John Stokes’ horse. These poems evoke, in Sanger’s words, “imagination’s creative energy, immanent in time and yet timeless, evidence of love, devotion and patience, evidence that by seeing art through its eyes we see more clearly through our own.”

During John Thompson’s sadly attenuated lifetime, he completed only two volumes of poetry. At the Edge of the Chopping There Are No Secrets and Stilt Jack (published posthumously), but seldom has such a slim oeuvre supported such a large reputation. When John Thompson: Collected Poems and Translations was first published in 1995, the reasons for Thompson’s stature became clear, and in the twenty years since then, his influence has only grown larger.

Thompson seeks out the darkest places of the heart, then floods them with light. These remarkable poems evoke the deep woods, the relentless turning of seasons that churn life into death, and back again to life. They unflinchingly examine his relationships, drawing out the pain and joys of domesticity.

Confessionally raw, but oblique and beautiful, Thompson’s poetry — and in particular, his experiments in Stilt Jack with adapting the ghazal, a poetic form with origins in Arabia — has influenced three generations of poets. As Peter Sanger notes in his definitive introduction, “For many young Canadian poets, composing a ghazal sequence has become a rite of passage, and Thompson is often addressed or alluded to as a tutelary figure.”

Reissued to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of its first appearance, this volume, edited and introduced by Peter Sanger, now revised and updated with new information and insights, gathers together all of Thompson’s extant mature poems and translations, including, in addition to the two published books, poetry published only in periodicals, unpublished poetry, and Thompson’s haunting translations from several of his French Canadian contemporaries and the great French poet René Char.