The least important man was a boy in the 1970s. He remembers clubhouses,
plastic soldiers, swimming lessons, rocket launches, a grandfather's
letters from World War I. Those days are long gone, however: now the
least important man is grown up. He lives in the city. He suffers
endless rush hours, he dreams of other places, he drinks cheap coffee
and crosses streets and sees explosions on the TV news. But through it
all he's still thinking about that old life, and wondering what it
meant, and asking in his quiet way how he might reconcile two such
transient worlds with each other.
The Least Important Man is the second collection from Gerald Lampert
Prize-winning poet Alex Boyd: sober, self-sacrificing, and handsome,
it's a book for those who want poetry to reassert its dignity and
authority in everyday life.
Alex Boyd is the author of Making Bones Walk (Luna Publications
2007) and the winner of the Gerald Lampert Award. He lives in Toronto,
Ontario.