Chainsaws in the Cathedral

To order this book, click on cover

From the back cover:
Peter Trower is the author of nine books of poetry and two novels, Grogan's Café, a novel of West Coast logging life, and Dead Man's Ticket, a mystery with a similar setting. His articles and poems have appeared in a variety of periodicals. He has worked as a logger for some twenty years. He has also appeared as him-self in the TV movie The Diary of Evelyn Lau. Peter Trower's last published book was Hitting the Bricks:Urban Jazz Poems (Ekstasis Editions), and he has a novel forthcoming from Harbour Publishing. He lives in Gibson's Landing, B.C.

"He has written at least ten great poems. Who has done that? Anyone? Not many. When you read these poems you feel like falling down on your knees to praise the divine muses."
Howard White, The Georgia Strait

"All right then-: Pete's words jump and push and leap and whisper and roar in your ears. All the strange jargon of loggers is at his command. Sometimes he uses rhyme and metre, but more often it's bounding careening free verse. Sometimes ten dollar educated words, then woods jargon that snaps and crackles in the ears."

Al Purdy, from The Introduction

Gathered together for the first time in one volume, Chainsaws in the Cathedral: Collected Woods Poems presents the finest poems, of West Coast logging life, in Peter Trower's career to date, including fifteen previously unpublished poems. The poems have been chosen from three decades of work, beginning with his mimeographed Poems from a Dark Sunday, as well as selections from the well-known Bush Poems (Harbour) and The Slidingback Hills (Harbour). Many have been revised for this edition, and are arranged thematically to document the creative sources of his work and poetry, logging life on the Pacific Coast. But beyond the mileu of working life, portrayed in these poems, Chainsaws in the Cathedral reveals Trower to be a versatile and musical poet, his ear attuned to the rhythms of the flesh and the wilderness. Peter Trower is the representative poet of the West, whose achievement reflects the vastness of the wild British Columbian outdoors, and like the West Coast wilderness, his poems have a marvelous tonal range, encompassing mountains and valleys and the ocean depths. He writes with a direct and brutal simplicity, but with a harsh and uncompromising vision. Trower is a poet who has written about an unforgiving and often violent nature and of the hard urban streets-both worlds he has lived and understands with an intensity few others can know. Chainsaws in the Cathedral, the defin-itive volume of Peter Trower's wilderness poems, reveals the passion and the poetic scope and the deep song of a major Canadian poet.

Cover Art: Bus Griffiths