The Iroquois Shoreline is the series of escarpments that run through Toronto and mark the shore of the Glacial Lake Iroquois, which covered the southern half of Toronto during the last Ice Age.

A poetry book about my love for my city, Toronto. This is the city I was born in and will always return to. I love its fabric, the people, how the very nature of the land has done its best to resist development leaving us with a city laced with parks and ravines that bring the wild into the heart of the city. You may think I exaggerate but one day, driving south on Kennedy in Scarborough (admittedly not the heart of the city, it is the East end of the city) south of the 401, there is a hydro right of way, and there between crowded apartment towers to the north and a strip mall to the south, on the verge of the road, contentedly grazing, stood a young buck and two does as I drove past at 50 km/h.

This is a book in the sense the Monochromatics is a book — it is an accretion of poems that will continue to grow until the day I die (at least, that’s the plan. And you know what they say: if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.)

It is a sound poem portrait of Toronto, of what makes the city: its people — and the rivers of harmony and dissonance that run between them. It is a portrait in time, beginning with the dawn and ending with the hours before the next dawn.

As such it was going to be very scattered, so I decided there had to be a love story in the midst of it — to keep my readers’ (and my) interest. And as I built the story of the passionate weather woman and the painter, I started to hear other voices: the mother, the father, the bums, the thief, the TTC conductor, all wanting to sing about the great city we live in.

So this is an unfinished script (oh c’mon, admit it — you have a few yourself!) You will have to fill in some blanks, accept that parts are missing—or rather, it is a launching pad that is now working, and will launch more poems/ songs as time and the heavens permit.

I hope you enjoy this, my fifth book.

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