These poems, arising from the ashes of a failed marriage and an early subsequent mid-life crisis, reveal the poet finding his public voice while he lived in Cape Breton for four years. Influenced by his reading of Carl Jung and practicing om meditation every day, he came to a deepening of both his private and his political committment.

Patick Jamieson was born in Vancouver in 1947 to a military family of six children. He began writing professionally in the 1970s and was appointed the first lay editor of the influential Prairie Messenger in 1981. He has lived all across Canada, including the Maritimes, where the poems contained in The Gray Door were composed between 1983-86. Trained as a social animator in the hey day of the Sixties, Jamieson discovered his voice as a poet with this work. He returned to the west coast in 1986 and founded the independent newspaper Island Catholic News. He has made his living, such as it is, working in Catholic church communications since 1978. Jamieson has a series of novels in the works based on his experience of small Canadian cities including Victoria, Fredericton, Saskatoon and Sydney, Cape Breton. Partrick Jamieson now lives in Victoria, and three grown daughters live in Saskatoon.

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