David Watmough

As a fiction writer David Watmough has explored a range of emotions and experiences, but with his book of sonnets, he is able to encompass a more intimate and personal dimension, with stylish charm and candid restraint. David Watmough again takes a turn at poetry in Eyes & Ears of Boundary Bay, a second volume of elegant sonnets, and his 20th published book, as a follow up to the recent Coming Down the Pike. Watmough reinvigorates the sonnet form, the most austere and yet the most elastic of forms, to probe beneath the skin of reality, to discover the essence of things as they truly are. The poems in Eyes and Ears of Boundary Bay are both lyrical and reflective, forming a discreet narrative stretching from immediate experience to distant memory. David Watmough cultivates a small garden of human experience, within the discipline of fourteen lines. Passionate and ironic, these poems are a testament of a life fully lived and realized through art.

David Watmough entered the poetry scene here through the sonnet, and like the form, his voice and language span past and present, and oceans with buoyant and apt usage in a Cornish-Canadian concordance. His sonnets and verses solder sadness, insight and wit to the deepest vessels of the heart.
George McWhirter

Naturalized Canadian, David Watmough has been shaped and nourished by a Cornish background as well as years in London, Paris, New York and San Francisco. All his novels, short stories, plays and poems, however, have been written on Canada’s west coast during the past 45 years. Geraldine, his eighteenth book and thirteenth fiction title, was published in 2007 by Ekstasis Editions.