Peter Sanger’s poetry has always demonstrated his extraordinary focus and vigorous engagement with the objects that surround him. These four essays find their basis in the everyday stuff of backwoods Nova Scotia, demonstrating how a road with two names, a crooked knife, an abandoned shipyard and a fragment of gypsum might hone our thoughts and shape our sense of words in place.

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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“Prose, Sophocles says, is the kind of poetry that walks instead of dances?or that is what prose was when Plato was a kid. That is the kind of walking, and the kind of poetry, Sanger has given us here. I’ve never seen the Shubenacadie River, nor set foot on Sanger’s farm, but he has taught me how to love them, as only one who knows where home is can.” Robert Bringhurst, Globe and Mail