Winner of the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers' Federation

Winner of the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry

In The Civic-mindedness of Trees, award-winning poet Ken Howe updates the vocation of the "nature poet" for the 21st Century. These poems are witty and philosophical meditations on the haunting presence of the natural world, and on the familiar presence of humanity within it. In this book, odes to oak trees and ground squirrels renew the mysteries of plant and animal life; it is not an idealized Eden untouched by people, but a world, also, of highways that skirt the abyss and of "the great ruined jobsites of space"?a world all the more strange for being real. At once playful and sublime, Ken Howe's linguistically daring investigations have updated "eco-poetry" for the information age.

Ken Howe was born in Edmonton, grew up in Beaverlodge, Alberta, and lived in Regina for eight years, playing principal horn with the Regina Symphony, before relocating to Toronto. He has studied German, philosophy, education and translation, has a degree in Music, and was a Jesuit novice for two years. Armed with a "reverberator" made out of a five-foot tube, springs and 7-Eleven Slurpee cups, Ken's cross-Canada tour for Household Hints for the End of Time - winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry and shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award - initiated many fellow poets and other spectators to enthusiastically declare him as one of the most entertaining writers in the country.

Ken Howe's profile page

"The reader feels utter confidence in the quirky journey he is taking us on. His scholarship is riddled with lingual jouissance, so that his poems of eco-yes (even the paeans to the pathetic fallacy) are imbued with adoring verve, leaping with the riches his original background as both musician and translator have proffered him." - Marrow Reviews