Everything comes from the earth, even poems. Especially poems.
And the poems and stories in Following the Plow: Recovering
the Rural, have their roots sunk deep in the land. These
authors know there is no such a place as nowhere. From the time
before enclosure, before the paving over of paradise, from when we
honored the soil and knew ourselves to be the guardians of a sacred
garden until the very present and urban predicament of humans, the
minds and hearts and souls of these contemporary, and mostly
Canadian writers know and acknowledge the deep connections in the
present which echo back through time. Hugh MacDonald digs a well
deep enough to see the stars by. James Reaney reads Milton while he
ploughs. Bill Robertson writes of the village lunatic. Lea Harper
watches the towns evaporate into the landscape. Jeff Seffinga
celebrates the beauty of pigs. Roger Bell tells of the yearning of
laundry in the wind. Patrick Friesen sees "in barbed wire and wild
roses the tangle of a man''s life." Cornelia Hoogoland remembers
licking salt blocks set out in a field of cows. Janice Kulyk Keefer
tells of wildflowers and ditch weeds. Jane Munro watches a long
freight train drawn across the prairie. From the four points of the
Canadian compass, from the farm and the village within, from when
we were tillers to now, these singers and tellers have what the
renowned Canadian poet Raymond Knister called ''a deep trust in
reality.'' For them, the field is more than the field. For them the
barn, the road, the stream, the ditch, the house, the ancient acres
of Ontario, the prairies, the far north, the oceans west and east,
the islands we inhabit, all have their metaphor. For them the
hamburger is not invented by a food chain clown. For them the
supermarket blueberry has its genesis on the shrub and comes plump
to the hand under heaven. For them something endures from beneath,
from within and beside the megalopolis building itself on the
earth.