The concept of DC Reid’s eighth book of poetry is the violence that humankind does to itself in its conflicts, recognizing, on the one hand, the waste of human beings over the centuries in armed conflict – The War Without – one of our unfortunate passions, and on the other, when conflict is turned inward – The War Within – and the goal is survival. In the external world of war, Gallipoli, for instance, was Churchill’s first major disaster. And Canada’s loss in the World Wars is also chronicled. A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness places man in the natural world, though he may not think that is his lot, and is saved by a deer and wildness. Narratives of Sex and Death, asks the Purdyan question: is there more than sex and death, or are we just reiterations of the founding mythologies of western civilization? Erebus is a political section that is, of course, where souls first go after death. The War Within moves from outer conflict to inner, and charts the mental territory of pain, cancer and the tiring dimension of radiation. It lifts to elegy in open-form love songs that offer resolution for the dead.

DC Reid is a writer and poet whose work lives in multiple disciplines: web-based video-poems for his book You Shall Have No Other on www.sandria.ca; environmental writing, for which he has won multiple awards including the Roderick Haig-Brown Award; and novels. His poetry has won silver in the Bliss Carman Award twice, among twenty other awards including the Colleen Thibaudeau award for significant support of Canadian poetry. He is a former president of the League of Canadian Poets and the Federation of BC Writers. He released a memoir of decades spent on the Nitinat River titled A Man and His River, published with Hancock House Publishers in 2022, and his most recent publication, Selected and New Poems, is his sixteenth book. DC is broadly known for extensive writing on in-ocean fish farms; neuroplasticity and extensive creativity mechanisms. He lives in Victoria, BC. www.dcreid.ca

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