The Gray Door displays a deep secular Catholic spirituality grounded in the real world. These poems reveal the poet finding his public voice after a failed marriage and subsequent early mid-life crisis. Though they document the poet’s awakening to the presense of the spiritual, they never lose grasp of the quotidian world. They are a revelation of unvarnished eloquence and plain-spoken lyricism. The gray door of Jamieson’s solitary mediation is an unlocked door: he has only to turn the knob to emerge into the other side of consciousness.

Patick Jamieson was born in Vancouver in 1947 to a military family of six children. He began writing professionally in the 1970s and was appointed the first lay editor of the influential Prairie Messenger in 1981. He has lived all across Canada, including the Maritimes, where the poems contained in The Gray Door were composed between 1983-86. Trained as a social animator in the hey day of the Sixties, Jamieson discovered his voice as a poet with this work. He returned to the west coast in 1986 and founded the independent newspaper Island Catholic News, and is the author of two non-fiction books, also published by Ekstasis Editions. He has made his living, such as it is, working in Catholic church communications since 1978. Jamieson has a series of novels in the works based on his experience of small Canadian cities including Victoria, Fredericton, Saskatoon and Sydney, Cape Breton. He is also planning a book based on his travel experience of Romania. Partrick Jamieson now lives in Victoria, and three grown daughters live in Saskatoon.