Dying Meteorologist

"Someone observed Canadians are the only people to talk about the weather and mean it. Certainly, our dramatic meteorological conditions provide a ready and easy conversational topic. Like hockey, our wide spaces, and clean water (?), our weather is a cliche at home and abroad. Over usage may trivialize it, but we are also dead serious about our weather, which, with its stark, primordial dramas, cracks our flesh and bones, bundles up our feelings, and inflicts itself on our imaginations. This is equally true whether we are outdoorsy types who embrace it, or indoorsy ones who shrink from it. (Another wag remarked that Canadians are less concerned with Revolution, than with Insulation....) We are dealing here with both an irreducible element and searching metaphor of the Canadian condition.... In Steve Luxton's poems, lyric and narrative, the weather, its beauty and duress, its interplay with light and land, appears everywhere. His facility for expressing our native sky, land and air is evident whatever the central concern of the poem: Time, Love, Loss, or that Big Cold: Death. In the moving poetic sequence containing the piece from which this collection's title, The dying meteorologist is drawn, the writer describes the winter-long illness and death of a dear friend with whom he has shared countless different temperatures and forays into wild air. Their relationship began and thrived in the profound natural metaphor. The eulogistic pieces that reflect and celebrate their bond suggest the moods of irrevocably changeful skies and the music of weather breeding winds...."--