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
