Poems

These are poems written from the edge of catastrophe. Duncan M. Matheson was the principal of Alexander McKay School in Halifax on December 6, 1917, when the city was torn apart by the largest man-made explosion in history before the atomic age. He watched fifty of his students die that day. Yet what emerges from this collection is not despair, it is something far more unsettling and beautiful. Matheson, who carried the weight of both World War I's global slaughter and this local apocalypse, chose to write about light. These are poems that refuse to look away from horror yet refuse to be consumed by it. They speak of education, of loss, of the strange persistence of beauty in a world that has shown itself capable of annihilating six city blocks in an instant. For readers who want poetry that has earned its hope through witnessing the worst, this collection offers something rare: words that know what they cost.