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Read My Book - Muskrat Ramble

History and Commentary From a Prairie Perspective
muskrat ramble

Kind Sirs and Gentle Ladies, I ask that you do me the honour of reading what might well be my final book of poems, Muskrat Ramble, and thereby discover a strange history told in cadenced words.

I was born on Saskatchewan’s shortgrass prairie in a frontier village named after Sir John Eaton, scion of the T. Eaton catalogue empire. The little village beside the CNR tracks had everything a reasonable citizen needed. These amenities included three churches, five bootleggers, three moonshiners and a house of ill repute. Even as a boy, I was privy to the secret sins that the priests and parsons were tirelessly combatting, I thought the situation was normal, exactly as it should be for a community which aspired to become a prairie metropolis.

I didn’t understand that in and around the little pimple on the prairie called Eatonia there were adventurers who had come to Saskatchewan to seek their fortunes and others who had fled to the West to escape from the consequences of their misdeeds. I was a polite little boy. Regardless of status or reputation, I called every adult male “Mister” and I doffed my cap to every adult lady. I kissed a pretty brunette with dark Spanish eyes when we were both five. When the deed was known and punishment meted out by the family court, I swore off women for life. When I was much older, I wrote a poem about her.

There is fertile soil around Eatonia, and the village itself was fertile soil for the growth of my innate talents. My primary-room teacher nurtured my love for words, music and art. She taught me to absorb knowledge as a sponge absorbs water. She was a blessing.

As I grew in understanding, wide-ranging knowledge gave me an escape route into the world of the imagination. You will see it in my poems that span the time from pre-history to a time which is yet to come. You will see it in my journeys into the history of the British Isles, the Boer War, the Great War and World War II. You will see it my interest in archaeology and my work as a diviner finding unmarked graves. You will see it in poems about people speaking in dialects and rough vernacular. You will see it in poems about teenagers, sexual desire and young love. You will see it in old sorrows and lasting love. Perhaps you will see the faint outline of the umbilical cord which has always connected me to the place of my birth. The small town of Eatonia has been my nursery, playground and prison, but imagination can take me instantly into other places and other times. When you take up my book, you go on a journey with me.

As I approach my 90th birthday, there may not be time for a final novel, but if there is, I hope Deana Driver of DriverWorks Ink will usher it into print. Muskrat Ramble is available from www.driverworks.ca and select bookstores.