Peripheries

Praise for Don Gutteridge’s Poetry:

"There is no doubt the poems collected in this svelte volume have been memorially ‘lived in’; they must negotiate a world with – and without – words. Gutteridge’s poetic offerings do not rely on complex conceptual acrobatics, but are seemingly designed as accessible snapshots of life. Each tells a story in the form of a vignette, its context established quickly like the flash of a photographer’s bulb. Accented with very memorable imagery, such as the widow Mrs. Bray being “bee-deep” in the flowers, or the tasteful alliterations of “glittering gladioli” and “dappling daze,” all serve to call us home to our humble archive of memories to delight in those moments when the slap of a strap, an engine drone, the spectacular light of the crepuscular evening and the passage of life to a wordless world are personally profound events. Both pleasant and haunting, we are treated to a world of velvet voices and muttering mortars in a memorial transfer from past to present, from present to beyond." - Kane X Faucher, Professor, Western University, in The Western News

"What an absolutely stunningly beautiful book. I love the lyric simplicity of Tidings (and in this context the word simplicity is very high praise indeed). I read poem after poem and think it is a masterpiece. There is an abiding sadness, but the sadness of wisdom, of knowing that if we live long enough, we lose loved ones, we keep them in our hearts though they are gone. Long ago I coined the phrase “the presence of absence” to capture in as few words as possible what I felt when I thought of those loved ones I’d lost. We preserve them in poems. We keep them alive in memory and dream. We weep and grieve and lament and celebrate. This book is profound and wise and consoling. I will be reading it again and again because it goes deep. It has the courage of autobiography without the honey trap of the confessional." - John B Lee, award-winning poet