Unexpected people that we meet, situations that we find ourselves in, and objects that we discover often change us. In his new collection of skilfully crafted poems, Personal Encounters, Laurence Hutchman speaks of his favourite artists and writers, poets such as Li Po, R. M. Rilke, Layton, Purdy and Cohen, who shaped his own poetics. With an intensity of full attention, he engages us with his subjects, discovers for us new meanings in their work, and lets us flow in the present moment of thought, making his experience part of our own. By creating an original sense of the history of his subjects, he commands us to look at them as if for the first time. Sometimes it's by an unusual situation as when Hutchman evokes a canvas of Mondrian in the tiles surrounding a whirlpool bath, or after waking in a post-operation state in the recovery room, when he imagines Chagall's poet flying over the village in Belarus. When he is describing the paintings of his partner, Eva Kolacz, or intimate moments they share, he speaks out of places we have been or imagined. Hutchman's poetry is immediate and personal, showing his attraction to people and objects that promise an encounter beyond our everyday experience.

Laurence Hutchman was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and grew up in Toronto. He received his PhD from the Université de Montreal and has taught at a number of universities. For twenty-three years he was a professor of English literature at the Université de Moncton at the Edmundston Campus. Hutchman has published 13 books of poetry, including Foreign National, Beyond Borders, Reading the Water, Personal Encounters, Two Maps of Emery, The House of Shifting Time, Fire and Water (in collaboration with Eva Kolacz) and Swimming Toward Sun Collected Poems: 1968-2020. He has also co-edited the anthology Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada and edited In the Writers’ Words.

His poetry has received many grants and awards, including the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence and has been translated into numerous languages. In 2017 he was named poet laureate of Emery, north Toronto. He lives with his wife, the artist and poet, Eva Kolacz in Oakville, Ontario.

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