Disarmament

John Terpstra’s Disarmament is a new collection of poems from one of Canada’s great literary craftsmen. Ranging over difficult terrain, from Port-au-Prince to the Iroquois Bar, Terpstra is always ablethrough keen observation and playful, thoughtful use of languageto locate the moral centre. Terpstra’s poems open and close distancesbetween the present and the past, parent and child, one country and another, the old world and the new, teacher and student, presence and absence, the human and the divine.

Finalist for the 2004 Governor General’s Award for Poetry.

AUTHOR

John Terpstra

John Terpstra is the author of eight books of poetry, including Disarmament, which was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award, and Two or Three Guitars: Selected Poems. An earlier work, Captain Kintail, won the CBC Radio Literary Prize for Poetry. He has also written three books of creative non-fiction. The Boys, or Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter was short-listed for both the Charles Taylor Prize and the BC Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. He lives in Hamilton.

Reviews

“John Terpstra’s meditations have the soundness and snug fit of consummate carpentry… with the toughness of maple, the compassion of cedar.” Don McKay

“John Terpstra’s Disarmament is a marvellous and moving collection of poem cycles assembled from a decade of work…his dominant speaking voice is a fully developed and historicized personality, one who has been to places, actual places, has thought about them and likes to share what he thinks.” Jeffery Donaldson, Books in Canada