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—<br> <br>as if it was all granted on probation by a stern but provident eternitude fiercely benign shrewdly forbearing.<br>