Mind Over Mountains: Selected and Collected Poems

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.

Jon Whyte was a remarkably original poet with an acute sense of the word
and a fine ear. He wrote shaped poems, collages, concrete poems (like
one laid out as a maze), and narratives—every work seemed to be an
experiment. His learning was exceptional, including Canadian history and
geology; “Homage, Henry Kelsey” shows how the imagination can be
intensified by scholarship. The Greeks thought that Memory was the
mother of the Muses, after all.

This book is a remarkably beautiful object, with fine printing and
design and splendid photographs of the Rockies, which were Whyte’s
great subject. The pages are wide, which accommodates Whyte’s attempts
to stretch the possibilities of the page. The book is a fine embodiment
of Whyte’s imagination, his genuinely lofty vision.