Brent MacLaine's poems, like the poet himself, are rooted in the history and landscape of Prince Edward Island. Yet, MacLaine possesses a remarkable ability to graft rural values to contemporary culture, with its urban habits and popular entertainments, its scientific theories and technological mythologies.

MacLaine belongs to the first generation of Islanders not farming the land, and his poems explore his uneasy relationship with the patch of earth where he lives. He follows the island contours in an expansive sweep across the fields and into the woods; he also shares an islander's sense of confinement, bound into a small place by the sea and the red cliffs. The island before human existence, the coming of European settlers, or the stubbled ground tilled by his father are as readily available to his fertile imagination as meteorological patterns, modern art, or The Odyssey.

Using his Maritime home as template for larger universal concerns, MacLaine offers clear-headed insight into the natural world — and into human nature — in an astonishing range of poems shaped by his nimble attention to his quotidian world.

Brent MacLaine's teaching career has taken him to universities in Vancouver, Edmonton, and Singapore. Since 1991, he has been a professor of English at the University of Prince Edward Island, where he has received the prestigious 3M Award for excellence in teaching. MacLaine is the author of one previous collection of poetry, the highly acclaimed Wind and Root (2000, Vehicule Press). His poems have also appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review, The Windsor Review, Matrix and The Cormorant, and in anthologies such as Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Poetry of the Land and Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada. MacLaine's ancestors came to Rice Point, Prince Edward Island, in 1838. Today he lives on a corner of the family farm there, overlooking the Northumberland Strait.

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