Lines on Trout River in Public Reverie magazine

Some of the poems in Lines on Trout River have now been published in Public Reverie; thank you, Theresa Smalec! A chapbook containing the complete series of poems can be ordered from https://turrethousepress.ca/ Here is the first poem in the chapbook.

                    This is not yet the sea, it is the river.

             —Louis Dudek, Europe

  

It’s nice being alone
in old age, sitting
on the side of the bed
with the radio on,
classical music
on the CBC, and
a book I’m reading,
The Epic of Gilgamesh,
reading
by the light
of a lamp
bought at
an auction
thirty years ago,
and the lamp
even then was old,
made in the 1930s;
it was the MSO
playing Mahler’s
4th movement
of Symphony # 5,
and outside the insects
sing what my English
ancestors called “the
Canadian Symphony”
after they moved
to Ontario from Blackburn
in the north of England,
the least fashionable part of the UK,
they were builders, plasterers,
painters, carpenters,
workers in the mills,
carters, and landlords
renting flats they constructed, 
a distant cousin collecting rents,
and one was a publican
and farmer, at the Yew Tree
Inn—oh tree of death—and the sounds 
are Canadian sounds
on a fall night,
in the darkness,
before sleep.

Lines on Trout River by Stephen Morrissey

             

Lines on Trout River has just been published by Jame Hawes at Turret House Press; this chapbook (booklet) is made up of thirteen poems that refer to the Trout River and the archetype of rivers, time, old age, and the relentless changes in life that we all experience. I lived beside the Trout River from 1979 to 1997 and it was the river that I liked most about living in southwestern Quebec. I think this is the best work I've written in many years; it's different than previous poems I've written but I think it's my authentic voice at this time of my life.   

Copies can be purchased from www.turrethousepress.ca

In Lines on Trout River, Stephen Morrissey draws together influences as diverse as The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Mahler, Nelligan, and Wordsworth, yet the poem remains unmistakably rooted in the particular history and geography of rural Quebec. The landscape becomes a “thin place,” where the visible and invisible worlds meet, and where poetry itself becomes an act of spiritual witness. Meditative, unsentimental, and deeply humane, The Lines on Trout River is both elegy and testimony: a powerful reflection on the passage of time and the persistence of the soul through memory and art.

                the Lines separating
                youth from old age,
                and writing poems;
                fields bordered
                by drainage ditches
                and the Morrison Side Road  

Mural by Mary Harris Filer, at the Montreal Neurological Institute, 1

I know of two murals at McGill University, one is by Marian Dale Scott, a prominent artist and wife of poet and law professor Frank Scott, and the other is in a conference room on the first floor of the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital (The "Neuro") on University Street, part of the McGill University Health Care hospitals. "The Advance of Neurology" is by Mary Harris Filer and was unveiled by Quebec premier, Maurice Duplessis, on 14 November 1954. 

Mary Harris Filer

                                                 

Artist's signature at bottom of the mural

Plaque beside the mural

Memorial to a Child that died, June 2011

 

Night, 6 June 2017

Looking south on de Maisonneuve driving west, just after Decarie

A jewelry store on Victoria Avenue below Sherbrooke

Corner Somerville and Victoria Avenue

At a reading at the Visual Arts Centre on Victoria

 

The garden on June 4, 2026

 

"Sabbath Poem: 2008, XII”, by Wendell Berry

 

2014

My people are destroyed
for lack of knowledge…

Hosea 4:6

We forget the land we stand on
and live from. We set ourselves
free in an economy founded
on nothing, on greed verified
by fantasy, on which we entirely
depend. We depend on fire
that consumes the world without
lighting it. To this dark blaze
driving the inert metal
of our most high desire
we offer our land as fuel,
thus offering ourselves at last
to be burned. This is our riddle
to which the answer is a life
that none of us has lived.

    —Wendell Berry