| Focusing an eye to unexpected subjects and vivid, often
startling settings - from Jerry Lee Lewis's charred piano, Newfoundland's Signal
Hill, Paul Verlaine's bottled siblings to a void waiting at the end of the ocean
- Iain Deans shows the virtuosity that makes him one of Canada's best and most
intriguing young poets.
In this, his debut collection, Deans moves through moments of
deep love to more extreme scenes verging on sudden dark moments of inner
conflict ... "I want to be a part / of a very dangerous machine,"
he writes in "Walking Along the Edge of Spring."
While in "Flak" - "You know / last night the /
radio / played a hundred love songs / not one
was about / someone like you."At all levels, Deans' immediate, emotional poems bridge bright
love, and shadowy tensions, beauty and excitement.
Iain Deans was born in Montreal. He attended Queen's
University and has lived in Toronto, Halifax and Montreal. His poetry has
appeared in a number of publications including THIS Magazine, Prairie
Fire, The New Quarterly, The Gaspereau Review, and the
anthology New Canadian Poetry. He currently lives in Halifax.
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