A comprehensive introduction to this enigmatic Canadian poet, The Essential Tom Marshallprovides an overview of the breadth of Marshall's career, from the intense, daring poetry of his youth in the 1960s to the reflective work of his later years.

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The city of Kingston stood at the centre of Tom Marshall''s personal and imaginative universe. He moved to Kingston to study at Queen''s University in 1957. In 1993 he died there, in the small brick house he had bought some years before. Though he spent time travelling in Europe after his graduation and later settled in London for a year to work toward a PhD, with a sabbatical year spent in Toronto a few years later, he always returned to the city where his parents had met. For years he lived close to the lake among the fine stone houses built in the nineteenth century when Kingston was in line to become the capital of Canada. In the 60s he inhabited an apartment overlooking the park named for Sir John A Macdonald and containing a statue of the man. Tom''s first long poem was about Macdonald and his park. 'Overlooking the park,'' he says in an introduction to the poem, 'I came to feel that there was a thing in it, a vision or Beast, to be observed and recorded.'' Later he wrote a lengthy set of poems, a kind of modernized sonnet cycle, which opens with a dedication to the city of Kingston. Marine city of my dreams, he calls it. Anyone who knew Tom in those days can easily trace on the map of memory a stroll down to the lakeshore with its view of Wolfe Island, the trudge to Queen''s past the old courthouse, the few blocks to the downtown, the walk back to the apartment on West Street, or in later years to the Annandale Annex, where his windows on one side looked out over tall willows, on the other over a parking lot and the elegant old houses of William Street. Anyone reading his early poems will learn the details of his daily life, as he passed through that rackety, half-gentrified core of the limestone city searching out the mystic fire at the edge of things. Sight burns us free of love to green paraphrase that burns us finally free of sight. What is probably the earliest poem in this collection, 'Astrology'', already suggests some of the qualities of voice and manner that lie at the core of Tom Marshall''s poetry. The offhand opening statement: 'It''s an approach. Say what you like/ about it. It''s an approach,'' leads on to a slyly ironic assertion 'I care more about this/ arrangement of words than about you,'' and finally the poem that began in a denial of sentiment ends with a high romantic demand, 'give me the whole fire of your heart''. A conclusion imposed by a self-dramatizing young poet perhaps, but the calm irony of the opening lines is characteristic, and the poem suggests his range of tones, the balance of humour and seriousness, the way his poems remain lyrical even when he is writing of bitter love, self-abasement, brilliant restless nights. In the early park poems the calm insistence of a quiet inward voice urges the reader on to another thought, another stanza. In this short selection there has not been room to include any of Tom Marshall''s ambitious long poems, 'Macdonald Park'', 'Islands'', 'Cosmic Photographs'', 'Fugue for Lonny''. One of the longer poems included here is 'The Lamb'', an evocative and powerful elegy dedicated to Susan Alliston; it becomes an invocation of a whole era of artists in London. Some of Tom''s poems about London in The Silences of Firesuggest that the city could still embody itself - as it did when T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land--as a kind of hell. 'The Lamb'' plays with that metaphor. The Lamb. Underworld saloon where Dickens, Wilde and Dylan Thomas drank, those haunted dilettantes, the poets of Hades and Bloomsbury . . . Oh Sue where are you? You should be the hostess of this Underworld. (A sidebar for those who enjoy gossip, as Tom did: in 2010, it came to light that Susan Alliston, to whom 'The Lamb'' is dedicated, was in bed with Ted Hughes on the winter night in 1963 when his wife Sylvia Plath committed suicide.) One of five brothers born into a middle-class family, Tom Marshall was both secretive and obsessive about his personal life. As an undergraduate, he chose history as his main field of study, and he had a consuming sense of the drama of the Canadian past, which played itself out in his poems. He delighted in the fact that John Montgomery, the owner of the tavern where one of the half comic confrontations of the 1837 rebellion took place, was one of his ancestors. At the time of his death he was completing revisions on a novel on the subject. In 1980 Tom Marshall''s first four books, each named for one of the elements, were brought together in a substantial selection called The Elements. In the following years a good deal of his creative energy was taken up by the writing of fiction. Tom Marshall''s final collection of poetry was assembled from material found in his files after his death, some of it highly personal and more direct than the earlier poems, and it included poems that he had kept on hand but not published. The old age and death of his parents was a source for some of his best late poems. 'Dream Sequence'', 'The Mother'', and 'Words for HSKM'' are attempts to come to terms with his strong and ambiguous feelings about his parents, his mother in particular. 'The Mother'', a vigorous portrait etched in wormwood, was written and set aside while his mother was still alive; it is impelled by bitterness and anger and yet perhaps contains something that is their exact opposite. 'For HSKM'' is an elegy and tries to reach some kind of accommodation. Human mysteries persist, deepen. There is no resolution. Only pain familiar and defining, strengthening. It has been argued that that Tom was not at his best with endings, that sometimes poems are forced to a neat conclusion. Perhaps that''s why the last poems are so strong; they open out, don''t give in to something; they have a lovely tentativeness. It may be that their new directions in tone and shape are the result of the fact that they were 'unpublishable'' poems and for that reason he allowed them a different aesthetic logic. Tom Marshall''s premature death at fifty-five in the small brick house on Victoria Street--where he imagined ghosts and lined up the sayings from Chinese fortune-cookies on his coffee table like some kind of Tarot--left his fine poetry to the merciless inattention of passing time. He is not on hand to help broadcast news of his work, though he is well remembered in Kingston as a figure central to the literary world there for more than two decades. Everyone likes to believe that the best of poetry will endure, but it doesn''t do so without help. Perhaps this collection, assembled by two old friends as a small act of affection and loyalty, will help to bring Tom back as a living voice.