Gutteridge's poetry is based on his remembrances of Point Edward, the small Canadian village perched on the shore of Lake Huron where he grew up. His poetry is rich and textured. His words fuse sense and sound, all tempered by the sense of time endless and flowing or frozen, or, in the case of the sands and waters of Canatara, simply eternal. I am, as always, most awed by Gutteridge's Canatara poems; his love letters to the dunes and the endless summers spent playing in the sand and braving the icy waters that whisper enticingly. I find myself captivated with the concept of immortality imbued in those sands and the vastness of the elements that built those shores up so lovingly. Family is also an enduring theme in this work, with the poet's grandfather looming large over everything. He is a constant, a source of strength, even if gone too soon. Gutteridge deftly plays with time, weaving past and present and the enduring aspect of life in Mara's Lamp. As with many of his other works, the reader is privileged to see Point Edward and those friends, who are his timeless past, revel and play in the shadows at night and in the brilliant, scintillating sunshine on endless Canatara Beach afternoons. This is a remarkable work that prods our sense of self and personal immortality, and it reveals how we are part of something grand and enduring.

Don Gutteridge is the author of more than forty books: poetry, fiction and scholarly works in educational theory and practice. He was born in Sarnia, Ontario, and raised in the nearby village of Point Edward. He graduated from Western University in 1960 with an Honours English degree, and taught high school English for seven years before moving to the Western Faculty of Education. He taught there for twenty—five years and is now Professor Emeritus. He lives in London, Ontario. In a review of his book The Way It Was, in The Western News, Kane Faucher said Gutteridge's poems have been "memorially 'lived in'" and "must negotiate a world with - and without - words…Both pleasant and haunting, we are treated to a world of velvet voices…in a memorial transfer from past to present, from present to beyond."

Don Gutteridge's profile page