To Glasgow

I moved to Glasgow in late February 2008 entirely motivated by my desire to study with Michael. I recall meeting with him in his attic office at the university, how his generous conversation filled me with a hovering sense of potential, a lightness like the spring sun that streamed through his window. I recall laughter, mine on occasion so uproarious that once an administrator in the next office requested that the Canadian please quiet down. Fair enough: my laugh, shaped by vast prairie horizons, was made irrepressible by Michael’s eye-twinkling wit.

When Michael left the University of Glasgow, I would take the early morning train to Manchester to meet with him at Carcanet’s offices, returning to Glasgow that same evening. I loved these journeys, the anticipation for our chats, and then, on the ride home, a renewed inspiration for the work. In the hemmed-in privacy of a cramped train carriage, the darkening sky, I read collections that Michael had pressed into my hands before my departure: Judith Wright, Les Murray, Eavan Boland, Bridget Pegeen Kelly. I was writing about my natal home, a marginal farm in central Saskatchewan, and Michael was right: these poets, along with the many others he’s suggested over the years, have helped my home-place come into clearer view.

In a recent editorial for the PN Review, Michael writes that poetry reading is collaborative, that ‘[c]ollaboration is basic to the art itself’. I sometimes wrote poems on the train ride home from Manchester, Michael’s conversation in mind. ‘A poem can come to know more than its poet did’, Michael ...