A former Poet Laureate of Canada and finalist for the Griffin Poetry
Prize returns with a wide-ranging new collection of poems.
CBC Best Canadian Poetry of 2020
In John Steffler's luminous collection, And Yet, dreams, memory and
desire are forms of wilderness that burst into our daily lives,
inspiring us to see ourselves and the world anew. Exuberant, powerful,
even prescient, the poems confront the unknown and unexpected around and
within us and call up our impulse to resist certainty and finality. The
flimsiest shelter might seem best; a trail guide's house is revealed as
a forest beyond names. What is outside might be most desired; a suit of
clothes gazing into a mirror longs to become an iguana. In the title
poem, a road-weary traveller comes in sight of the longed-for home--yet
at the last minute turns away. Restless in their own language, the poems
muster the impact of direct sensory experience and remind us what it
means to live closer to the physical world. At times their attenuated
forms acquire the anxious beauty of Giacometti sculptures. Our capacity
for surprising change, these poems suggest, is both a cause for caution
and a reason to hope that we can reinvent ourselves and transform our
destructive technological culture.
