Ecologue is the culmination of Ken Belford's lifelong quest to reconcile land and language, innovation/development and earth's geographical history, nature and humankind's place within it. He extends this deep contemplation to the relationship between poem and reader, deftly shaping his lines into a pure expression of where "ritual and mystery loiter, beyond supervision and the noise of the narrative."

Ken Belford was born to a farming family in Alberta and grew up in Vancouver. For more than thirty years, he, along with his wife and daughter, operated a non-consumptive enterprise in the unroaded mountains at the vicinity of the headwaters of the Nass and Skeena Rivers.The “self-educated Lan(d)guage” poet has said that living for decades in the “back country” has afforded him a unique relationship to language that rejects the colonial impulse to write about nature, but speaks from the regions of the other.“The conventional standards of narrative and lyric poetry give me nothing. The intention of the sequences I write is to assemble words that can be messaged to the habituated souls of the city from the land-aware that live outside city limits.”Currently living in Prince George, British Columbia, with his activist wife, Si, Belford continues to write outside the boundaries of the conventional forms of the various schools of poetry.His seven previous books of poetry are Fireweed, The Post Electric Caveman, Pathways Into the Mountains, lan(d)guage, when snakes awaken, Ecologue, Decompositions, Internodes, and Slick Reckoning.

Ken Belford's profile page

"A thought-provoking, resonant anthology."
--Midwest Book Review

"Ken Belford, geographically peripheral, [is] absolutely central to Canadian poetics."
--Robert Budde, American Book Review