Ondaatje is said to care more about the relationship between art and nature than any other poet since the Romantics.

    His best friends have moved away, and he has to stay at the cottage with only his little sister and Aunt Margery. His parents have remained in the city so his father can have an operation. When Jeremy finally sees him again, he finds out that his father has cancer and isn't going to get better. Suddenly, everything is different. Then Jeremy finds an unlikely friend in Tess, who knows what it's like to lose someone. As his friendship with her grows, through good times and bad, Jeremy discovers that his father has left him something that will live forever ...

    Davies has re-edited them to produce a single volume and in the prefatory "A Drink with Marchbanks" even given us his own view of the journalist he created. A pleasant entertainment covering such diverse topics as politics, theater, and manners, this volume offers a humorous and insightful picture of postwar Canadian life as seen through the eyes of a delightful eccentric who reminds this reader of a boozeless W. C. Fields.

    It still stars the letter H, and introduces Probable Systems, Negatives, and the Actual Life of Language! Your heart will pound as you see H's turn into I's before your very own eyes. You'll thrill as words fall apart only to create other words. You'll gasp as bpNichol collaborates with the dead. You'll shake your head in disbelief as he walks the line between fact and fiction one step beyond into the twilight zone of 'pataphysics.