Black Ice

Barry Butson, who has published in more than 200 magazines and whose first book of poetry won him the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award two years ago, is being hailed in Canada as Al Purdy's successor, because of that down-to-earth and swaggering style of writing about people. His poems are about lovers on trains or slippery highways, or the lonely people in cars or telephone booths, the salesmen, the suicides, the painter, the athletes. Nothing and no one escape his attention in this journey, which at times hovers over events from the past and the present with a sentimental but ironic attitude. Butson, born in Stratford, Ontario, grew up in a large working class family, has tasted life's adventures in working as an electrician's assistant, a pharmacy courier, a newspaper reporter, a tobacco primer, mail carrier, construction worker, soldier and high school teacher. He has turned these experiences into real life poems.