A Skeptic in Springtime wrestles with uncertainty and aging, hurricanes, gravity, and particle theory. Amid all the unknowns, "Still, the white-throated sparrow cries I'm here, here, here, here." Although rooted in the PEI landscape where he grew up, MacLaine ranges farther afield to Assyrian myth in "Killing a Lassamu," to the Song Dynasty in "Su Dongpo Makes Ink," and to art in "Claude Monet in the Waiting Room." The book closes with an elegy to the late John Smith, a close friend and the former poet laureate of PEI. Combining keen observation of the natural world and the human condition, the poems in this collection contain, as Smith wrote, " a universe which has leapt from nothing into something."

Brent MacLaine's teaching career has taken him to universities in Vancouver, Edmonton, and Singapore. Since 1991, he has been a professor of English at the University of Prince Edward Island, where he has received the prestigious 3M Award for excellence in teaching. MacLaine is the author of one previous collection of poetry, the highly acclaimed Wind and Root (2000, Vehicule Press). His poems have also appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review, The Windsor Review, Matrix and The Cormorant, and in anthologies such as Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Poetry of the Land and Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada. MacLaine's ancestors came to Rice Point, Prince Edward Island, in 1838. Today he lives on a corner of the family farm there, overlooking the Northumberland Strait.

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