Description: "Swimming Toward the Sun: Collected Poems 1968-2020 gathers together five decades of poetry of the accomplished Canadian poet Laurence Hutchman. He invites us to take a poetic odyssey, starting in the late 1960's enriched by his travels to Europe, leading us through the turbulent times in cosmopolitan Montreal of the 1970's, to a long residence in New Brunswick and finally his return to Ontario. Through a powerful and daring use of language and a haunting musicality of lines, Hutchman explores the relationship between real and imaginative landscape as he bears witness to his place and time."--
Review Quotes:
In a literature that is constantly being weakened critically and artistically by momentary voices whose importance fade almost the moment the ink hits the page, Hutchman's work carries many of the hallmarks of poetry that has survived the test of time - the love of nature expressed by Bliss Carman, the keen eye for observation articulated by Archibald Lampman, the gift of connecting the idea to the place found in Raymond Knister's opus, and the deep, energetic passion of Gwendolyn MacEwen's haunting lyricism.
--Bruce Meyer