The Scent of Spring, Elegies Out Of Season

Documentary and Witness poetry capture the turbulence of contemporary life, its urgent issues where we all often helplessly confront individual crises and global disasters. In this collection of fifteen elegies, a little boy rides his bicycle through the wreckage of his hometown, Mosul; an animal rights activist attempts to rescue a truckload of pigs heading to slaughter; St John ignores the refugees drowning in the Mediterranean and continues to write a chapter of the Judeo-Christian Bible in his cave nearby; in Toronto a homeless beggar woman unexpectedly shows the narrator a glorious Asian pear; and a Japanese fisherman travels to northern B.C. in a redemptive moment encounters his childhood boat and an elusive spirit bear.