Later Poems

Bliss Carman's Later Poems gathers work from a poet who spent his life listening to the music in language. These are verses written in the autumn of a remarkable career, when Carman's voice had grown both quieter and more certain. The collection moves through the seasons with a pilgrim's attention, finding in an April moon or a late autumn field not mere scenery, but a kind of scripture written in light and motion. Carman was Canada's poet of the open road and the turning year, a romantic who carried Victorian lyricism into the twentieth century without losing its essential faith: that beauty speaks, if we will be still enough to hear it. These later poems carry the weight of that listening. They are less urgent than his early work, more willing to rest in wonder, to let a beech tree or a winter sky simply be. For readers who have grown tired of irony and noise, here is a book that asks nothing but your attention in return.