Summer in Furnished Rooms reflects on the passage of time and breathes new life into people and places that disappeared long ago. From Gregorio Fuentes, skipper on Ernest Hemingway’s boat and inspiration for The Old Man and the Sea, to toucans and paradise tanagers undulating in waves of colour on a Colombian wildlife preserve, to the old red-brick Empire Theatre on Ogilvy Street and the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, showing there in ’64, Marc Plourde invokes a life’s experience in resonant narrative verse.

Born in Montreal in 1951 to English and French Canadian parents, MARC PLOURDE spoke mostly English as a child at home, but was schooled in French. His first poems were written and published in French before he was seventeen, but thereafter he began writing in English, strongly influenced by Alden Nowlan and others (at nineteen he made a solo pilgrimage to New Brunswick specifically to meet Nowlan.) Traces of a French sensibility nevertheless colour his poems, which are preoccupied with people and the places they inhabit. Plourde's gifts were recognized early on: a first collection of poems, Touchings, was published by Fred Cogswell's Fiddlehead Poetry Books in 1970, followed by The White Magnet (poems, stories, and a one-act play) with D.C. Books in 1973, and a collection of stories, The Spark Plug Thief, in 1976. Thereafter the poet fell silent for two decades, turning instead to translating Quebecois writers, notably Gaston Miron, whose selected poems, Embers and Earth, he co-tran

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“Marc Plourde is an honest poet whose poems, often homages to the Montreal of the 60s and 70s, deserve to be taken seriously.”

Norm Sibum, author of <em>Gardens of the Interregnum</em>

“‘What to say of memory’s insistence,’ Plourde asks, ‘its rush of days / filling the cracks in each moment with traces of the past?’ Even as he cannot answer his own question, he leaves the reader with a deep appreciation for why he must ask it.”

Literary Review of Canada