Unbroken Lines: Collected Poetic Prose 1990-2015

Here is the definitive book of prose-poems, destined to be a classic of the genre on every reference shelf. A new adventure in the evolving presentation of Canadian poetry, a welcome innovation of compact vision, allowing many threads of existence to wind together on a brief, powerful page. The lyricism, the heart-tug of common human experience, is strongly present, just as the emotional highs we have come to expect of great poetry. James Deahl’s prose-poem form allows the freedom of disparate experiences to be gathered with meaningful connection into the paragraphs poetically linked. The form is not limited to a single insight, but has the sweeping vibrancy to allow geography, time, season, and circumstance to flow together, like a stony riverbed, ever changing, ever the same, as we imprint personal events onto the backdrop. A story unfolds and surprises inside each prose-poem here, enhanced by natural setting, a history straddling the tides of our memories and experiences in cities and towns that have watchfully witnessed our arrivals and departures. Unbroken Lines heralds a welcome new experience in poetic expression, leaves you hungry for more. The introductory poem, “Damp Stones,” encapsulates the hammer power of compact lines, shadowing myth, beauty, fear, desire, old yearnings caught in knots of the woods in all our subconscious minds. Deahl’s poem “The Meadow” expresses these revelations searingly: “only the realm of indestructible forms remains, a realm outside the tarnished world of matter, like a meadow of endless spring living in the imagination of a child.”