A quietly devastating, deeply elegant poetry collection.
A celebrated Canadian poet and former editor, John Barton turns to the terrain of his own past to examine how memory, loss, and lineage shape a life. Born in Edmonton during the early years of the oil boom, he grew up with “pressures high and low, our parents swirling / each against the other,” and the early poems return to this uneasy domestic terrain. The prairies, foothills, and mountains are rendered not as scenery, but as emotional climates. Watching a storm shift over the Rockies he writes, “the cloudy arch it slid under brieflyable to throw / hope over all I can’t forget.” The collection’s emotional center is Barton’s mother—formidable in youth, vulnerable in her final years, and loved with a clarity sharpened by loss. Her decline, and Barton’s late-life caregiving, give the book its most intimate moments. In “Driving to the End,” he distills this reversal with heartbreaking restraint: “your head dropped to my shoulder…knowing now I was not unloved.”
Set against this tenderness are the quiet ruptures surrounding his father—absences, betrayals, and secrets that surface decades later. Mid-collection, Barton broadens his gaze to the larger histories beneath Canadian identity, confronting the legacies of settler colonialism with a steady, reflective conscience. The later poems turn toward queer lineage and artistic inheritance. Barton acknowledges the solace he found in figures like Christopher Isherwood and Paul Monette—writers whose candor shaped his self-understanding during the AIDS pandemic. Influence, he suggests, can arrive from the dead, the distant, or the pages of a book. Throughout, Barton’s lines are controlled, measured, and luminous. The title’s metaphor holds: like compulsory figures etched on ice, the patterns of family and history mark us long before we know how to read them. As he recalls his sister skating, “eight/ assured, overlapping circles/ I hadn’t grasped are graved into/ the thin plate of what I recall.”
Part memoir-in-poems, part reckoning with the imprints of ancestry, art, and loss, this gracefully written collection carries the reader across decades of love, fracture, and return.
Caitlin Press
Pub date Sept. 19 2025
ISBN 978-1773861661
Price $19.70 (USD) Paperback