The Lower Provinces

Daniel O’Leary’s new collection of dramatic poems combines scholarly recovery of early Canadian visionary experience and new translations of early French-Canadian poems and documents, to create a series of dramatic settings presenting a revived Canadian poetic ethos. In The Lower Provinces, O’Leary rejects the notion that Canada lacks a deep and visionary culture, or that the country’s commercial colonization by American financial interests is too far advanced to be resisted. Instead he presents an imaginative, frequently humourous cast of early Canadian voices who reflect as much on our own as on previous times. In both visionary recovery and faux antique pastiche, O’Leary examines the claims of the present and calls for a deeper appreciation of the insight welling up from Canada’s past.