Description: "This is How We See the World" includes eighteen previously published chapbook written over thirty years by multi-award winning poet John B. Lee. Poet George Whipple calls Lee the greatest living poet in English. James Deahl refers to Lee as the premier People's Poet of his generation. Marty Gervais sites Lee as the best poet in Canada.
Brief description: In 2005 John B. Lee was inducted as Poet Laureate of Brantford in perpetuity. The same year he received the distinction of being named Honourary Life Member of The Canadian Poetry Association and The Ontario Poetry Society. In 2007 he was made a member of the Chancellor's Circle of the President's Club of McMaster University and named first recipient of the Souwesto Award for his contribution to literature in his home region of southwestern Ontario and he was named winner of the inaugural Black Moss Press Souwesto Award for his contribution to the ethos of writing in Southwestern Ontario. In 2011 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Norfolk County (2011-14) and in 2015 Honourary Poet Laureate of Norfolk County for life. A recipient of over eighty prestigious international awards for his writing he is winner of the $10,000 CBC Literary Award for Poetry, the only two time recipient of the People's Poetry Award, and 2006 winner of the inaugural Souwesto Orison Writing Award (University of Windsor). In 2007 he was named winner of the Winston Collins Award for Best Canadian Poem, an award he won again in 2012. He has well-over seventy books published to date and is the editor of seven anthologies including two best-selling works: That Sign of Perfection: poems and stories on the game of hockey; and Smaller Than God: words of spiritual longing. He co-edited a special issue of Windsor Review-Alice Munro: A Souwesto Celebration published in the fall of 2014. His work has appeared internationally in over 500 publications, and has been translated into French, Spanish, Korean and Chinese. He has read his work in nations all over the world including South Africa, France, Korea, Cuba, Canada and the United States. He has received letters of praise from Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Australian Poet, Les Murray, and Senator Romeo Dallaire. He has been called "the greatest living poet in English," by poet George Whipple, he lives in Port Dover, Ontario where he works as a full time author.
Review Quotes:
John B. Lee is a poet of many passions. Whether he is lyricizing about obscure historical figures or the hardscrabble life of the family farm, Lee's poems have a richness of imagery, metaphor and narrative drive that would be the envy of Dylan Thomas or Gerard Manley Hopkins. No poet in Canada today has the range and depth of this master craftsman. Image is piled on image until the reader is left breathless with admiration. Love inspires his poems, love of land, love of Nature, love of history and all its guts and glory. In these 490 pages Lee runs the gamut of his inexhaustible curiosity and we are the better for it.
Don Gutteridge
When I began to look at this compilation I encountered a writer of great scope, and poetry that is profound and wide-ranging. When you have finished this book (and I urge you to do so slowly, re-reading and savouring its nuance as you go) you too will see John B. Lee's wide and deep observations of this wondrous life. This is how he sees the world, and as we are drawn in, how we too begin to see it.
You will find that he isn't afraid to be playful, cheerful, light in his touch, as he begins with Poems For One or More Feet. He asks of you: read this poem/to set yourself free. He requests that you imagine each line/ hammering on the floor/like a spoiled child. He shows you irreverence. Toes look up to you. But then he demonstrates his power by jerking you back to sobriety with the final line of the section: Your toenails die last.
For it isn't Lee's cheekiness that predominates in this volume, although you will find elements of joie de vivre everywhere. But what you will really see is the gravitas he brings to his vision of this world. He is unafraid, as good writers all are, to point out that we are always on the verge. He keeps us aware of the fact that we are mortal. He doesn't want you to crumple under that awareness, but he wants you to recognize it, to accept it.
He is a poet constantly in search of satisfaction, of good, of beauty, and, usually finding it. He says, quite replete, I'm God's enoughness/for a while. He experiences this enoughness all around him, in both the familiar and the foreign. Lee grew up on a farm in Kent County, in Southwestern Ontario and that rural side of him appears often. I owe the earth such gratitude/for this briefly borrowed dust. He takes you away to Costa Rica and eloquently describes the richness of bird life there: heaven fits the sky.