The Lower Provinces

In The Lower Provinces, O’Leary rejects the notion as that Canada lacks a deep and visionary culture, or that the country’s commercial colonization by American financial interests is too far advanced to be resisted, and instead The Lower Provinces presents a resume of convincingly reconstructed early Canadian voices who seem to reflect on our own rather than on historical time. This delightful book uses the past, but the present is its real subject. In both its acts of visionary recovery, and in more satiric moments of faux antique pastiche, O’Leary’s poetry trenchantly examines the claims of the present, and calls for a deeper appreciation of the insight surfacing from the well of the Canadian past.