The Sun the Wind the Summer Field

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

Alfred Bailey, born in 1905, was a founder of the Canada Council and
more importantly, for Maritimers, of The Fiddlehead magazine. The book
under review brings together a number of his unpublished poems.
Bailey’s poems have always had a strong sense of place, and this
volume includes some good treatments of places like Baie St. Paul and
the “Kingdom of Saguenay.” His poems flow quite easily; he is very
good at letting a poem unwind over many lines in a natural but not banal
manner. Just as the reader starts to think of him as primarily a nature
poet with an attunement to landscape as well as to wild flowers, Bailey
demonstrates a sharp sense of the contemporary world, as in the amusing
“Computer Misprintout.”

The Sun the Wind the Summer Field was published as a tribute to this
major figure in the cultural life of New Brunswick (and Canada as a
whole), but it holds up well on its own merits.