An essential collection by Canada's most astoundingly diverse-living poet.
Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall gathers together the best poems from the seven books that have earned Andrew Lafleche his distinguished position in our literature. Here is the full range of Lafleche's distinctive, versatile voice-poems of humour, pain, love, and melancholy; poems charged with compressed imagery or stretched into lovely, loping, contemplative lines; cruelly ironic love poems; poems about derelicts, about hopelessness, and about history. In all of them, Lafleche executes marvellous control, playing emotional chords as a musician plays an instrument, so that each poem resonates in the reader's mind-fine, clean, clear, and beautiful.
There are poets' poets and people's poets. And then there are those few who are neither and both: the few who become, over time, part of the warp and weft of their culture. Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall collects, for the first time, work from all corners of this extraordinary start of a career. In its verve and variety, this is a one-of-a-kind collection.
"Spare in its use of poetic conventions, but startling and vivid in its imagery. Each of its core images will stay burned in my memory for some time to come."-Kimmy Beach, author & poet
"The subject matter of the collection is quite powerful."-McClelland & Stewart
"Consistently striking and leaves my mind a whirl."-Ella Jane Myers, editor & publisher, Open Minds Quarterly
"Filled with tragedy and remorse."-Ronsdale Press
"Andrew Lafleche is an honest and courageous writer. There is an eyes-wide-open accuracy to his work, no matter the subject matter. Hemingway once said of writers he admired: 'They're true gen, ' meaning they were the genuine article, writers he considered incapable of deceit, and incapable of playing dumb. Andrew is a True Gen writer."-Ron Corbett, award-winning journalist, broadcaster & author of the Frank Yakabuski crime novels
"He's like a surgeon with a shotgun."-Akeem Duncan, Quiet Lunch Magazine
