Alongside

You can't enter the past -- it's true -- but there are towlines that steady you alongside.
Their unravelling renders tomorrow indistinct. -- from "Shoreland"

Anne Compton's fourth collection, Alongside, tells an unexpected love story, a celebration of beauty which begins in the mind and wanders out into the garden and back again through the library. It is a story that moves between the wild and the domestic. Beauty, like the figure of the fox that appears and re-appears here, is joyous and elusive, glimpsed and gone. Every poem in the book is a conversation, with other writers, with lovers, with books, and an Island past. A conversation about the way in which the unlived life always walks beside us.

Anne Compton is a two-time winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize and winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry for her second collection, Processional. In 2008, she was awarded the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English Language Literary Arts. A former teacher and writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick at Saint John, she developed and directed the acclaimed Lorenzo Reading Series.