BOOKS
And Yet (McClelland & Stewart, 2020)
From the publisher: In this luminous collection, dreams, memory and desire are forms of wilderness that burst into our daily lives, inspiring us to see ourselves and the world anew. Exuberant, powerful, even prescient, the poems confront the unknown and unexpected around and within us and call up our impulse to resist certainty and finality. The flimsiest shelter might seem best; a trail guide's house is revealed as a forest beyond names. In the title poem, a road-weary traveller comes in sight of the longed-for home--yet at the last minute turns away. Restless in their own language, the poems muster the impact of direct sensory experience and remind us what it means to live closer to the physical world. Our capacity for surprising change, these poems suggest, is both a cause for caution and a reason to hope that we can reinvent ourselves and transform our destructive technological culture.
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Forty-One Pages: On Poetry, Language, and Wilderness (University of Regina Press, 2019)
From the publisher: In this series of elegant and wide-ranging meditations on language, wilderness, poetry, and technocracy, John Steffler takes us on a guided tour of one poet’s mental workshop. His focus is vividly personal, shaped by his interests and experience, and at the same time universal. What is it to be human? Steffler is not afraid to be provocative, but he is also compassionately alert to moral, political, and cultural complexity. This is a book that will convince you that poetry can indeed make a great deal happen.
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The Grey Islands. London, Ontario: Brick Books, 2001; McClelland & Stewart, 1985.
From the publisher: The Grey Islands is the story of one man’s pilgrimage to a remote island of Newfoundland’s northern peninsula. Using a broad range of styles, The Grey Islands delivers the bite of raw experience and embraces existence at the edge in all its terror and beauty.
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The Afterlife of George Cartwright. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992. New York: Henry Holt, 1993. M&S: New Canadian Library edition 1999. Montreal: Lemeac Editeur (French translation by Helene Rioux) 2021.
From the publisher: In this stunning and original novel, John Steffler has recreated a lost time and place, and has given life to an enigmatic figure from Canada’s 18th-century past. Described quietly by historians as “soldier, diarist, entrepreneur,” George Cartwright emerges in Steffler’s tale as a character of overwhelming appetite and ambition. Until this time Cartwright’s greatest legacy has been the place in Labrador named after him and the journal he wrote during his years there, when he lived amongst Native people and ran a successful trading post. Now his legacy becomes our own: a telling portrait of our past; a warning.
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German Mills. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau Press, 2015.
Curious about the background of German Mills? Wayne Grady unpacks the colourful life of its main character William Berczy in this Kingston Whig-Standard article.
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Helix:New and Selected Poems. Montreal: Véhicule Press, Signal Editions, 2002.
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That Night We Were Ravenous. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998.
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Out of print (contact the author):