Dragonflies, Those Bluejays of the Water

I was talking to someone earlier about Peter Van Toorn, and we agreed that Mountain Tea is an amazing book. I've read quite a lot of Canadian poetry, and to me MT has very little competition for the best collection of poems ever published in this country. It's very close to Irving Layton's A Red Carpet for the Sun, anyway. Ever since I first read the book, after its republication by Vehicule Press's Signal Editions imprint in 2004, I've been recommending it to everyone I talk to about poetry. I posted a link to Van Toorn's brilliant essay on the sonnet in my last post. Here are a few more tidbits for the uninitiated:

Audio of me reading Van Toorn's "Dragonflies, Those Bluejays of the Water."

A dialogue review of Mountain Tea I did with George Murray at Bookninja.

A little essay I wrote about Van Toorn's sonnet "Mountain Leaf" (reprinted for the essay) for Arc last fall.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much else to speak of on the net. Which is a shame, because he's one of the most unique voices of 20th C poetry. Go out and read his book, damnit!