David Cottingham (b. 1949) has been writing poems, off and on, most of his life. His "career"--and the places he has lived and loved, from the plains and mountains of western Canada to the New England coast to the backroads of Europe viewed from a bike--has been as varied as the selections featured in this volume. He has been a taxi driver, hydrocarbon well-log analyst (in oilpatch-speak, a "mud-logger"), multilingual font designer, and copyeditor. He insists that he is not a poet, but an ordinary guy who occasionally writes poems. This collection is his first attempt to assemble them as a book, and he offers them as glimpses of one man's irregular quest to grasp reality and make sense of the world, construed with a quirky religious edge--

as if it was all granted on probation by a stern but provident eternitude, fiercely benign, shrewdly forbearing.