Tidings

Don Gutteridge began his poetry writing career with a number of long poems based on historical figures from Canada's past. He felt more comfortable composing poems that were somewhat distant from his own persona (although there was a lot of him in them). However, by 1977 he was writing about his home-ground in A True History of Lambton County, with a mixture of both personal and public poems. Then with God's Geography in 1982 he came around to fully expressing his own persona, although his interest in local characters and events remained strong. In the last fifteen years he has written nothing but short lyrical poems, most of them set in his home village of Point Edward, Ontario, and many dealing with his family and friends. He now feels comfortable with these kinds of poems and Tidings is a quintessential example of his late work. The first section deals with portraits of characters from the village, remembered mostly from a childhood perspective. The second and third sections are about his present life, particularly about the ageing process and the business of poetry writing itself. He has been heavily influenced by the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and Al Purdy, giving his poems a strong rhythmic sense and a feeling of forward, narrative movement. He was fortunate to grow up in such a lively and memorable village as Point Edward with more than its share of interesting characters and a long and colourful history. Considering also the great lake at its feet and the roaring St. Clair River, Don has had a cornucopia of things to write about and inspire him. He endeavoured to make Tidings strike the delicate balance between nostalgia and ironic distance.

About the Author :
Don Gutteridge is the author of more than forty books: poetry, fiction and scholarly works in educational theory and practice. He was born in Sarnia, Ontario, and raised in the nearby village of Point Edward. He graduated from Western University in 1960 with an Honours English degree, and taught high school English for seven years before moving to the Western Faculty of Education. He taught there for twenty-five years and is now Professor Emeritus. He lives in London, Ontario. In a recent review of his last book, The Way It Was, in The Western News, Kane Faucher said Gutteridge's poems have been "memorially 'lived in'" and "must negotiate a world with - and without - words...Both pleasant and haunting, we are treated to a world of velvet voices...in a memorial transfer from past to present, from present to beyond."