There is an extraordinary figure on the landscape. His name is Hogg, known to be ambling through history and cities without apparent purpose by secretly in search of passionate adventure, telling his story in poems and continuing to create himself. This time, he has gone straight into the inferno of the past century, Leningrad, to make love under the murderous eye of all the Cops in the sky. As the great American poet, Hayden Carruth says about the poems collected here: “The centred line contains the murderous image, all the more grim for its sardonic elegance. I know nothing like these poems. They are brilliant extrapolations from an appalled imagination at the end of a dreadful millennium, unquestionably first-rate.”

BARRY CALLAGHAN founded the internationally celebrated literary quarterly, Exile, and imprint, Exile Editions, while he was a war correspondent in the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s. He is a novelist, poet and journalist and his work has been much anthologized. His numerous awards include Toronto’s One Hundred Outstanding Citizens Award, the inaugural W. Mitchell Award and the Foundation For The Advancement of Canadian Letters Award for Fiction which he was honoured with twice.

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