Gary Geddes has been Balled Canada's best political poet. For almost forty years and in more than a dozen poetry collections, Geddes bas written with power and insight about political issues
both domestic and foreign. from the Paul Chattier Affair and FLQ terrorism in War and Other Measures to the infamous Somalia Affair in a work-in-progress called Airborne Particles. However,
Geddes is not an ideologue in poet's clothing; the disturbing intimacy and specificity of his poems transcends the merely political. Whether he is writing about isolated events such as the Kent
State massacre, or about ongoing crises such as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he does so with sensitivity and compassion towards the individual lives that are ineluctably bound up in
political events, lives that can so easily be ignored.
Robert G. May is an assistant professor (adjunct) in the Department of English at Queen's University, Kingston. A specialist in Canadian literature and culture, he has written on Duncan
Campbell Scott, F.R. Scott, Gary Geddes, and John Barton.
