Vanishing Act

“Old voice, the gods of rhyme and metre, crumbs of earth and putrefaction hanging from his lips, the poet comes, rising from the dead, orroyos for eyes, roar of blood pounding against canyon walls, his ancient vehicle, too, clicking and road-worthy, counting each kilometre and stress, echoes of Cohen, mordant, arrhythmic, dreaming of diamond-eyed Lucy, the first and last woman. Giles Blunt is here, dripping prose petals, song lyrics. Welcome him home.” –Gary Geddes, author of What Does a House Want?

When Giles Blunt’s first crime novel appeared, the Toronto Star said it “immediately raises the bar of Canadian crime fiction.” The Globe and Mail calls him “a master storyteller,” and fans of Blunt’s fiction are familiar with his ability to shape a tense narrative for maximum impact. With Vanishing Act, his debut collection of verse, Blunt delivers equally potent strength and quality, opening up for the reader a new, “wicked pack of cards” – in that deck, a cast of characters that speak to the different stages of personal journey: coming of age, heartbreak, terrible loss, the fear of death, philosophical musing, and the personal apocalypse that may one day come… But more than anything, this rich sequence of poems is about how our personal identity changes over a lifetime.

Giles Blunt, of Toronto, is a 10-books crime fiction novelist, who now turns to poetry as a way to express what fiction cannot/never can.