Guernica Editions

Allan Briesmaster learned his craft from the great rhapsodists: Wordsworth, Hopkins, Thomas. Mature and eloquent, Confluences is large in ideas, passions and rhythms. A poet both expert and humane, Briesmaster bucks literary fashion; he follows the river of his inspirations to its source and draws the reader to the inner places of music and vision.

There is a Gerard Manley Hopkins feel to many early pieces, an ecstasy in nature and a meditative music that turns on pure energy. With unwavering concentration, Briesmaster wanders through the natural world to rediscover the human. A late Romantic in love with rural Ontario, he packs these poems with the precision of a sensual cartographer, carefully charting the “reptilian repose” of “Reedy River” with its “flat sidewise architecture” through memory and depth to “the blue empty surface and breadth// of dry heaven.”

[on Pod and Berry:] Briesmaster is the kind of companion we all might wish for in walking and thinking and talking and in silence as we move into and through the world.

Briesmaster’s poetry settles on you like crisp, fresh sheets; its elegant versification strikes a note as pure and clean as snow. Like physics or dance or incumbent weather, Interstellar is simultaneously simple and complicated, fluid and structured, scientific and lyrical – invoking a sense that the secrets of the universe will be revealed, if one just reads closely enough.