The Breath You Take From The Lord is a masterful volume that confirms Patrick Friesen's reputation as one of Canada's finest and most versatile poets. In language striking in its simplicity and strength, Friesen's work moves with the controlled intensity of a hawk circling in a vast prairie sky.

These are poems infused with a sense of reverie and innocence, wisdom and clarity, reflections on those things, material and ethereal, that define who we are and where we come from. Drawing on old stories, the stark landscape of the prairie, the rain and mist of Canada's West Coast and the characters of his childhood, Friesen takes the reader on a human quest for the divine.

Patrick Friesen is the author of Blasphemer's Wheel, winner of the Manitoba Book of the Year Award and runner-up for the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award. A Broken Bowl was short-listed for the Governor General's Award. His most recent work st. mary at main was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. He has also written for stage, radio, TV and film. He lives in Vancouver where he teaches writing.

Patrick Friesen's newest collection Carrying the Shadow is a haunting ode to the lives we have felt too briefly, known only in passing and yearn to hold still. While those who loved them keen softly between his lines, Friesen invokes their loss as one remembers a cool breath on the back of the neck, a faint shadow on a headstone, a watermark on the bedstand. With wisdom and beauty and invention, Friesen walks us through the graveyard of human kind where a symphony of voices still conduct the lives left behind long after they depart flesh for spirit. Intermingling prose poems and traditional free verse, Friesen both narrates and sings the stories of absence and forgetting, tales of lingering memory and fleeting love. With infinite candor and sensitivity, Friesen celebrates the lives of idols and iconoclasts, wives and widows, farmers and freeloaders. For anyone who has urged another title in the canon of Friesen's award-winning work, here is a collection worthy of accolade. Death has no dominion, but poetry has dominion over all.

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