 Godspeed
John B. Lee's collection of poetry in Godspeed, which was an English sailing ship, examines the captivating stories of the seafaring and colonial explorers from the 16th century. Lee intertwines his lines of nautical and imperial verse with historical text from such personalities in history as Sir Walter Raleigh, Master George Percy and Sir Francis Drake. What makes this extended narrative so distinctive is how Lee treats the historical element in the most engaging manner. He manages to capture all the splendour of the historical in these riveting ocean-going stories.
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 Poems for the Pornographers' Daughter
This is a beautiful book–lyrical, subtle, delicate, profound–that there is nothing anywhere the least bit lascivious or salacious or voyeuristic or titillating or scurillous or likely to offend.
There is nothing doubtful, nothing that I even feel I should ask a friend a second opinion on. This book hardly ever enters the territory of dark eros, and that is usually when people start to get edgy.
There are so many outstanding poems, so many gorgeous lines, so much insight and sensitivity, that I can't even point them out—I'd be going on for pages and pages. This book is a livesong, a praisesong, a celebration of creation, a lamentation of our times, for how far we have fallen from the gracestate in which we began.
It is a finely differentiated hymn to the human body. Poems for the Pornographer's Daughter is a masterpiece. I don't say that lightly and in fact I don't ever say it to anyone. I'm pretty critical of most writing. — Marilyn Gear Pilling
Poetry, 96 pages 5.375 x 6.125, $17.95
ISBN 0-88753-401-5
 The Farm on the Hill He Calls Home
"I've hoed beans. Mowed hay. Painted barns. Slopped hogs. Thrashed wheat. Built houses. Broke cattle. Shoveled corn. Mucked pens. Dug graves. Stooked grain. Slaughtered hogs. Driven truck. Ploughed land. Burned stubble. Worked fields. Cut boars. Shorn sheep. Bulled cows. Fixed fences. Watered livestock. Shown heifers. Polished halters. Blown stumps. Pitched straw. Culled runts. Trimmed horns. Wrung bulls. Castrated cattle. I've inoculated the sick and helped with the midnight calving hot to the shoulder in breach.
"I've done all that and more. And that was before I was ten years old. I've worked hard and slept keen. As a boy growing up on a farm I knew what it was to feel dog tired and yet to work on into the gloaming of summer and then to sleep the sleep of angels.
"But I couldn't wait to leave. I looked longingly down the road and dreamed of adventure in the city. Since I left the farm to become a writer, I've slept an ever-more bookish sleep of the idle thinker. It's been a long while since the deeply satisfying physical slumber of my straw-hand childhood.
"I was born a fifth-generation John on the land settled deep in southwestern Ontario by my great-great grandfather and namesake, Irish John Lee. I betrayed my heritage and left the farm at eighteen to pursue a career as a teacher and a poet.
"Though I left the farm on the hill I once called home, almost everything I know can be measured between the railway line running the far acres of the back fields by the bush and oak to the south, and the Gosnell line to the north and the village east and the neighbour's farm west where I once watched ten thousand swans fly down to rest like snowfall on the till as far as I could see into the distance."
The Farm on the Hill He Calls Home continues a journey I began with the publication of my first award-winning book, Hired Hands. It complements the two award winning trilogies The Black Barns Trilogy and The Highgate Trilogy and it deepens the tell of memory as I look to the two-hundred acres of prime farm land which are the rich source of much of my best work as a poet.
SBN 0-88753-394-0
Memoir/Non-Fiction, 108 pages, 8 x 8, $18.95
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 The Half-Way Tree: Poems selected and new —1970-2000
"Where Lee differs from other poets is in his powerful use of language. His imagery reminds me of the incantatory 1940s poets and is among the strongest I have seen in a long time."
–Ronald B. Hatch, Essays on Canadian Writing
At mid-career, it seemed high time for internationally acclaimed, award-winning poet John B. Lee to bring together between the covers of a single volume the best of his previously published works.
One senior Canadian poet even went so far in his praise as to say of John B. Lee that he is "the greatest living poet in English." The Half-Way Tree reaffirms the range and depth of John B. Lee's work making it easy to understand why he is the only two-time winner of the Milton Acorn People's Poetry award.
ISBN 0-88753-354-X
270 pages $19.95
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 Totally Unused Heart
‘the best living poet in English.'
–Geore Whipple
Totally Unused Heart is the first book in the second half of internationally-acclaimed, award-winning Canadian poet John B. Lee's writing life. It includes some of the best poems Lee has written to date.
ISBN 0-88753-386-8
98 pages $19
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John B. Lee sows everyday experiences with a timeless gravity and awe . . .”
—George Whipple
His imagery reminds me of the incantatory 1940s poets and is among the strongest I have seen in a long time.
— Ronald B. Hatch
Dogs and Horses
(from Days of Dogs and Horses)
These are the days of dogs and horses.
These are the days
of fallow, the countryside
exotic with weeds
and empty barns.
The sheep are all pretty without dung.
Their newborn lambs
no longer the colour of cotton dipped in iodine
for the dressing of wounds.
All the gentrified artists are harmlessly happy
and working their trade
in milkpaint and cloth
and the cows moo politely from quilts
above their swishing pails
as white as Queen's linen
and the pasture's unflappable
as Elizabeth at chapel-oh
the dogs stay beside the fire
like folds in paper
and pigs are deep in thought
philosophers on the verge
of great ideas
and horses jump and canter
like a carousel
because all the best animals
have poles through their heads
and if they move then
out of their stagey circles
let them move like Greek statues
bumped against politely in galleries
or tapestries stirred
by a breeze along a summer wall.
©John B. Lee
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 Building Bicycles in the Dark
A practical guide on how to write
Building Bicycles in the Dark is a very practical primer on how to become a writer. It poses and answers such frequently asked questions as: "how do I become a writer?" "how do I write poetry?" "how do I write creative fiction?" "how do I write creative non-fiction?" "how do I get published?"
n 1990, poet John B. Lee left the profession of teaching to pursue a career as a full-time author. Since then, he has been touring North America combining his career as a stay-at-home writer with that of the peripatetic teacher of craft. He has been instructing aspiring writers from kindergarten through writers of all ages even to those who might call themselves "advanced writers." He has visited elementary, secondary, and university classrooms in Canada and the United States and been the guest of English faculty as far away as Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has performed, sung, recited his poems, songs and riddles, and taught the craft of writing, passing on his enthusiasm for the written word to writers of all ages.
0-88753-355-8
$19.95
 Stella's Journey
Stella's Journey adds a third voice to John B. Lee's brilliant, award-winning Highgate Trilogy. In 1987, Hired Hands, part one, won Runner Up in the inaugural Milton Acorn Memorial People's Poetry Awards. IN 1995, Part Two, Variations On Herb, won the author his third Acorn with what poet, publisher, critic, James Deahl calls a Canadian classic. Stella's Journey is a worthy conclusion to this master work.
The book was recognized in manuscript form, being short-listed for the 1998 Canadian Literary Awards of CBC Radio and Saturday Night Magazine. Three of the poems were also short-listed Sandburg Livesay Poetry Award. Stella's Journey is a verse biography that critic Michael Allan Marion credits Lee says is "lean and piercing, laced with powerful metaphors and imagery which expose the true soul.”
ISBN 0-88753-326-4
88 pages $16.95
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 Soldier's Heart
Soldier's Heart continues John Lee's exploration of stories rooted in the untold or seldom-told lives of average Canadians.
The book was short-listed for the Tilden Award and the poem, "If I Were A Nation Innocent of War"won the People's Political Poem Prize.
Before emigrating to Canada, John B. Lee's maternal great-grandfather, Henry Busteed left his home in Bandon, Ireland to serve as a soldier of empire in South Africa in the Boer War. Soldier's Heart is an empathetic 19th century expression coined to refer to the psychological traumas suffered by soldiers in battle.
As a character in these poems Henry Busteed travels to Malta and from there to South Africa where he engages in many of the major battles of the war. He experiences the moral ambiguity of participation and observation; he witnesses the visit of Winston Churchill to Brantford; and he returns from the war to establish a farm in Mull, Ontario, Canada.
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Tongues of the Children
Meticulous research and an understanding of the untold stories that compose our history make John Lee an enormously engaging chronicler.
Quill & Quire
Lee (in Tongues of the Children) has rescued some of the stories from the oblivion... He is as down to earth as the milkers of cows or the hockey players on frozen ponds who humanize his work.
–The Windsor Star
Eight men executed by hanging, rebels escaping in women's clothing, mass graves for famine victims: these are not descriptions of the dark ages but of Ontario history, the history of Burlington, Kingston, Brantford recounted in Tongues of the Children by John B. Lee, hailed as one of North America's best poets.
ISBN 0-88753-285-3
134 pages $15.95
Never Hand Me Anything If I'm Walking or Standing
Lee has done his work well... moments of high comedy or low tragedy...refreshing, effective, astounding, Never Hand Me Anything strips Lee back to the essential melodic lines, and we see he composes them even better than in his earlier work....the ground may have been hard to work. But the harvest is a binbuster.
–Brantford Expositor
John Lee got the title for Never Hand Me Anything If I'm Walking or Standing from a chance remark he made at a poetry festival in Prince Edward Island to which someone replied, "That would make a great title for your next book."
Lee didn't initially mean to take up that challenge, but he did write a poem about it. The poem appears in this collection, along with a mixture of others that range from the humorous and slapstick to the serious.
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The Beatles Landed Laughing In New York
John B. Lee's Jimi Hendrix In The Company of Cows (from The Beatles Landed Laughing in New York) provides the best of the new poetry – imaginative, contemporary vignettes.
–Rolling Stone
Noteworthy and award-winning collections; confirms Lee as one of the nation's major poets.
–Dave Wesley, Southam News
On February 7, 1964 at 1:20 p.m., a little-known British pop group landed in New York for a first North American tour. Two days later, they changed the life of a young farm boy in southern Ontario forever. Lee pays tribute to the Beatles, the group that changed his life and the lives of an entire gene |
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 Don't Be So Persnickety
Illustrations by Frank Woodcock
My dog runs backwards
Down the hall.
Sometimes she is big.
Sometimes she is small.
Sometimes she isn't there at all.
In his first book for children, John B. Lee shows his great love of language and their sounds. With the combined work of the gifted teacher and illustrator, Frank Woodcock, Lee succeeds n stealing the hearts of kids. The poems and illustrations here sing with an excitement about the "real” things kids feel and the "real” things kids do.
ISBN -88753-352-3
62 pages $17.95
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