These poems take the reader on a mind-blowing journey across the known micro- and macrocosms to the extreme outer edges of space and time. The counter-intuitive insights of modern science here become reality as we are led to question the representations of our senses. Quantum physics and cosmic relativity, captured in the intimacy of the prevailing sonnet form, create a dynamic challenging the reader to reaffirm the human world in the face of the unknowable.
When you seek a truth at the heart of things/ you become the victim of your own paradigm./ Peel away the skin of an onion and all you get/ is layer after layer of onion -- and tears in your eyes.
The Canadian imagination, as elusive as the Canadian identity, is nevertheless a reality. Henry Beissel finds its constant source of strength and renewal in the wonder of our northland ... This epic is the first to see it in its entirety, as a matrix which binds the whole together in a national mythology.
F.R. Scott (on Cantos North)