Chewing Water

Chewing Water continues Nelson Ball’s fascinating forays into the social, into communities of humans, after spending decades writing almost exclusively about nature. While mourning, loss, and decay are featuring more heavily than ever in his poetry, friendship, hope, and love are gaining on those themes. Nelson’s poems concentrate on the tiniest things, the tiniest moments: a letter of the alphabet, an expired fly, a crack in a friend’s wall, the tone of a friend’s voice. While these poems are brief, the spirit behind them is expansive. This book is a landmark in the growing oeuvre of a Canadian poet whose influence has only grown over the decades.

AUTHOR

Nelson Ball

Nelson Ball was born in Clinton, Ontario, and raised in southwestern Ontario. He was active as a poet, editor, and small press publisher in the 1960s and 1970s. Since 1972 he has been an antiquarian bookseller specializing in Canadian literature. He edited Frank Harrington’s Kristmiss Book, published by The Mercury Press in 1993, and is the author of three Mercury poetry books, At the Edge of the Frog Pond, Almost Spring, and The Concrete Air. Ball resides in Paris, Ontario, where the Nith and Grand Rivers converge.