Don Kerr’s fifth poetry collection is a verbal joyride, an exuberant celebration of a book: a celebration of mountains and plains, of growing up and of being young, of being alive in the present moment and absorbing the feel of the road through the palms of your hands on the wheel. Autodidactic represents an erotics of the everyday, a tribute to place (and movement) and to family (and friends). This is not to say that Kerr sentimentalizes the ordinary, but rather that by examining it in the bright prairie sunlight, he is able to reveal its true extraordinariness. The deep-felt humour that is in many of the poems here does not arise from gilding events with comedy, but from the poet’s seeing and drawing out of events what is truly and inherently comic within them. In this book Kerr is able to demonstrate the many shades of his voice and the many facets of his craft.

SHORTLISTED for the 1998 Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry