Lookout

The first collection of new poems in more than a decade from one of Canada's most respected poets and the recent Poet Laureate of Canada. The wide-ranging poems inLookout John Steffler's first book of new poems since his award-winningThat Night We Were Ravenous(1998) celebrate the landscape and history of western Newfoundland, which is inseparable from an exploration of the poet's own life. The poems embrace the limestone barrens on Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula and the poet's personal life, the end of a marriage, the beginnings of new love. There is also a series of poems about his parents' struggle to deal with his mother's Alzheimer's during the last year of her life.

JOHN STEFFLER was a recent Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada. His five previous books of poetry include The Grey Islands, That Night We Were Ravenous, winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize, and Helix: New and Selected Poems, winner of the Newfoundland and Labrador Poetry Prize. Steffler is also the author of an award-winning novel, The Afterlife of George Cartwright.

LIMESTONE BARRENS
The Role of Calcium in Evolution
Book Rock
Cape Norman
Park Office
Barrens Willow
Wind Shadow, L’Anse aux Meadows
Revelations
Notes on Burnt Cape
Location
Warm Shallow Sea
 
OUTSIDE
Dividing Island
Marine Drive
Body and Soul
Under Blomidon Face
Tree near York Harbour
Swoop
Inside the Boiler of the ss Ethie
Beyond Names and Laws
Wissembourg, Alsace
Amorgos
Sunburnt on Naxos
There Is No One to Blame
Bloodroot
Mail from My Pregnant Daughter
 
ONCE
 
OUTSIDE
Removals
It Is a Blue Dome
Collecting, Bay of Islands
Uplands
Skink’s Tail
Lean-to
Beating the Bounds
Under Mad Dog Lake
Battle at Halfway Point
Melancholy Facts
Bear Brains
Smudging the Map
Blomidon Head
In the Winter
After Ten Days Together
Without Maps
Kiparissia
Tomb of Clytemnestra
Mystra
Mycenae
 
COLONIAL BUILDING ARCHIVES
VA13 Humber Mouth
A10-142 Settlement at Mount Moriah
A10-150 Holloway: John’s Beach
A20-86 Postcard: Cement Plant, 1955
A30-160 Building the Paper Mill
VA28 Postcard: Paper Machine
A30-158 Wood Supply
A30-161 Mill Manager’s House, Corner Brook
B10-38 Lee Wulff Fishing the Upper Humber
B10-39 Lee Wulff Fishing the Upper Humber
B10-40 Exploits River
B10-43 Self-portrait, Serpentine Valley
 
Acknowledgements