Leavings

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 ?ercely benign shrewdly forbearing.