Nov 2010 | 5.5 x 8.5 | 16 pp | 978-1-926655-19-2 | $10.00

Hay Day Canticle

A Poetry Chapbook by David Zieroth

Zieroth: "A portrait of an agricultural feed-supply salesman may be an unusual subject for a poem, and how I came upon the speaker in Hay Day Canticle is not entirely clear, but as his story presented itself to me, I followed him from prairie-farm childhood through first sex to marriage, affairs, baseball. At the time I had been reading Louis MacNeice's Autumn Sequel, a poem whose use of rhyme had long interested me. I suddenly found myself using MacNeice's form, and the result is this nine-part narrative, each part consisting of eight three-line stanzas, a shape helpful in releasing and containing the man's song of tragedies and joys."

David Zieroth’s most recent book of poetry, The Fly in Autumn (Harbour, 2009), won the Governor General’s Literary Award and was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry in 2010. He has also published The Village of Sliding Time (Harbour, 2006) and Crows Do Not Have Retirement (Harbour, 2001), poems, and a memoir, The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill: A Country Boyhood (Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002). He won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for How I Joined Humanity at Last (Harbour, 1998). A chapbook, Berlin Album (Rubicon Press), was released in 2009. He taught at Douglas College in New Westminster, B.C. before retiring and founding The Alfred Gustav Press, a micro press for publishing poetry. He lives in North Vancouver, B.C.

Visit www.davidzieroth.com.