I Could See It Spoken brings together Harry Thurston’s two earliest poetry collections, barefaced stone (1980) and Clouds Flying Before the Eye (1985), as well as previously uncollected poems written between 1969 and 1985. In surveying this body of work, spanning the years from fledgling youth to middle-age, the reader tracks the evolution of a writer’s preoccupation with the subject of time—historical, ancestral, seasonal and personal—and the development of one of the most iconic voices to come out of the Atlantic region in a generation.