Description
Book SynopsisThe least important man was a boy in the 1970s. He remembers clubhouses, plastic soldiers, swimming lessons, rocket launches, a grandfather's letters from World War I. Those days are long gone, however: now the least important man is grown up. He lives in the city. He suffers endless rush hours, he dreams of other places, he drinks cheap coffee and crosses streets and sees explosions on the TV news. But through it all he's still thinking about that old life, and wondering what it meant, and asking in his quiet way how he might reconcile two such transient worlds with each other. The Least Important Man is the second collection from Gerald Lampert Prize-winning poet Alex Boyd: sober, self-sacrificing, and handsome, it's a book for those who want poetry to reassert its dignity and authority in everyday life. Alex Boyd is the author of Making Bones Walk (Luna Publications 2007) and the winner of the Gerald Lampert Award. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Trade Review"Consistently strong. Boyd's images and metaphors are deft." - Winnipeg Free Press "The poet can work magic in miniature: poems about chess pieces, toy soldiers, and house spiders each animate aspects of civic and personal life ... 'Basil Rathbone Meets God,' 'A Stuntman Destroys the Hate Window,' 'Samuel Drowns, at Thirty' and others are among the book's most beautiful and surprising. By the end of the collection I was able to count a number of these standouts. And man, that is important."-Quill & Quire
Table of ContentsThe Least Important Man A Glimpse Of My Bright Life in the Morning 1977 To a Businessman At Rush Hour The Balding Man Feels the Music Canada Day Snapshot, 2004 Someday the Men With Hats Will Go And the Morning Brings Rush Hour Two Thirteen Line Poems on How We Need a New Poem Formula For the Body and the Bullet How Words Feel Captain Kirk Love Poem Rod Serling’s Funeral, 1975 Brick and Bone The Culture of Shyness Notes on a Small World Remembrance Day, 2001 Undersea Homage to Everything In Place First World Wars Dream Dead Bees Are Indomitable Vesta Lunch Eyes Only Know How to Steal The Weight of a Fool Firenze Elementary Summit Around One: Late Friday Subway Notes The Dignity Machine Eric the Swimmer For All Undone Things Instinct Mama Spider The Echo of Isaac Brock At Forty Moving Into History Poem In the Sun Uncertain, Texas Little Green Men Basil Rathbone Meets God Tomorrow at Ten For One Second at Midnight Samuel Drowns, at Thirty I Just Have to Get Through This Orwell Robot A Stuntman Destroys the Hate Window No One On the Streetcar Swallowed
