Sea Run is a fully revised and expanded edition of Peter Sanger’s scarce, privately circulated monograph on the sources and possible meanings of John Thompson’s influential poetry collection Stilt Jack (1978). Working with manuscripts, typescripts, documents and other personal papers that were unavailable at the time of Sea Run’s first appearance in the 1980s, Sanger has produced “a species of notebook compiled at a pedestrian’s pace, with allowance for detour and obstacles.” Sea Run offers readers a window both into the texts and cultural contexts underpinning Thompson’s richly allusive poems, and also into a mode of reading and thinking about poetry that recognizes and engages the “cultural keepings” in which literature is rooted.

Raised in Ontario, Peter Sanger (1943) was born in Worcestershire, England, and was for twenty-six years a professor at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College in Truro. An editor of The Antigonish Review, Sanger also edited John Thompson: Collected Poems and Translations (1995). He founded the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia. His books on poetry include SeaRun: Notes on John Thompson's "Stilt Jack" (1986) and "Her kindled shadow . . .": An Introduction to the Work of Richard Outram (2001, 2002). A collection of essays, Spar: Words in Place, was published by Gaspereau Press in 2002.

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