“Cool, clean, precise, the descent into a deep, memorable cenote, is where Ken Cathers captures the world in a cavern. His short lines focus attention on apparent minutia, which is the first unravelling of seedpod, pure liquid, a flower you had not until that moment imagined. In words as minimal as I, he, she, 700 years of history, of Tenochtitlan, of Aztecs and invading rulers in Cathers’ Letters from the Old Country centre the universe in as few words as possible. Ken Cathers, like John Pass, is ‘the best poet you’ve never heard of’. Paul went on to the GG, and Ken deserves the same.”
~ D.C. Reid, author of These Elegies

“The heart of sun, streaming down a cavern, bringing light to dark spaces. Cathers bids you slow down and read each highlighted word, what flows from one thought to another, to poem to flower, Ken Cathers’ poems are beautifully sensual, robust, and anticipatory. Language and landscapes thicken with quietude, at times scabrously, to produce lines that surrender to pleasurable aching: ‘How beauty begins / with the scar’, writes Cathers, ‘splinter of sun / off broken glass’.”
~ Orchid Tierney, author of a year of misreading the wildcats

“Ken Cathers, for decades one of the country’s best poets, always ‘sounds’ right, and never more than here in Letters from the Old Country. He knows how to score a poem — line, breath, stanza, breath again — where few poets have any ear at all for what they are doing. There’s a sensitivity, a subtlety and inventiveness in these poems that allows cadence to dance slowly down the heart of each page. His organically shaped lines flow like pure liquid. Cathers has become, by now, nothing less than a contemporary Master in Canadian poetry.”
~ Stephen Bett, author of The Gross & Fine Geography:
New & Selected Poems and Journal for Breathing Arizona

This is Ken Cathers’ seventh book. He has been widely published in periodicals and anthologies in Canada, the U.S. England and Australia. He has a B.A. from the University of Victoria and an M.A. from York University in Toronto. He lives a quiet life in the trees on Vancouver Island with his wife Inge, his sons and grandchildren.