In Keeping Watch at the End of the World, Harry Thurston explores the ways in which poetry stands sentinel at the edge-places where known and unknown meet. Whether that frontier lies between land and sea, present and past, health and illness, or youth and aging, Thurston holds that the poet’s duty is to survey the horizon and “see things before they take shape,” chronicling occurrences both acute and remote. A poet-naturalist in the tradition of Thoreau, Thurston reminds us of the importance of being fully present in the midst of our own brief lives, of shaping what we see into poetry’s “steeped words–dark, light, and sweetened gifts.”

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Harry Thurston is the author of several collections of poetry and twelve nonfiction books, including Tidal Life: A Natural History of the Bay of Fundy, winner of three non-fiction prizes in the Atlantic region; The Nature of Shorebirds: Nomads of the Wetlands; and A Place between the Tides: A Naturalist's Reflections on the Salt Marsh, which received the 2005 Sigrid Olson Nature Writing Award in the United States and was shortlisted for the 2005 BC Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. He has also written for such magazines as Audubon, Canadian Geographic, and National Geographic. Thurston lives in Nova Scotia.

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