The title poem in David Zieroth’s the bridge from day to night follows the speaker across the Second Narrows Bridge to North Vancouver, a well-worn moment in a daily commute that opens a window into the sublime: “from the apex / of the bridge with traffic flying / I look directly into / their deepest clefts.” Such moments occur throughout the collection, as Zieroth explores the resonance built from layers of such ordinary moments as they accumulate throughout a lifetime—indistinct and imperceptible as they occur, but creating unseen undercurrents through memory and time.

In this temporal landscape, the natural world becomes a touchstone, both entangled in and standing apart from the speaker’s internal narrative: “I brought from that forming hour a / precise smell of foliage: funeral wreaths / bore an acid scent.” Shifting fluidly through time, the speaker grows from a child to understand, reflect and then outlive his parents. Finally, the collection lights on the incongruities and contradictions in death: “still later I kick his flattened corpse / to the gutter, and it skids on concrete / a broken valise, weightless / on this segment of the journey.”

With his characteristic humour, subtlety and ability to find transcendence in the everyday, Zieroth traces the delicate strands connecting the most minute and familiar details to the most profound mysteries, giving voice to the unknowable.

David Zieroth’s The Fly in Autumn (Harbour, 2009) won the Governor General’s Literary Award and was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry in 2010. Zieroth also won The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award for How I Joined Humanity at Last (Harbour, 1998). Other publications include the trick of staying and leaving (Harbour, 2023), watching for life (McGill-Queen’s, 2022), the bridge from day to night (Harbour, 2018), Zoo and Crowbar (Guernica Editions, 2015), Albrecht Dürer and me (Harbour, 2014), The November Optimist (Gaspereau, 2013), The Village of Sliding Time (Harbour, 2006), The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill: A Country Boyhood (Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002) and Crows Do Not Have Retirement (Harbour, 2001). His poems have been included in the Best Canadian Poetry series, shortlisted for National Magazine and Relit Awards and featured on Vancouver buses three times as part of Poetry in Transit. He watches urban life from his third-floor balcony in North Vancouver, BC, where he runs The Alfred Gustav Press and produces handmade poetry chapbooks twice per year.

David Zieroth's profile page

“the bridge from day to night is not a book that can be read quickly; its poems are packed with images and ideas that will cause you to stop, stare out a window, and ponder where they’re taking you… [It] is a book to be savoured, and begs the reader to take the poet’s journey across the bridge.” ~ Al Rempel, Arc Poetry Magazine

Arc Poetry magazine