Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Manijeh Mannani, Series Editor, for including this book in her wonderful series, and to her colleagues at Athabasca University Press: Walter Hildebrandt, Director, Erna Dominey, Senior Editor, Brenda Hennig, Administrator, and Natalie Olsen, Designer, for welcoming, nurturing, and bringing out this book in such an elegant form. My thanks also to the two anonymous readers for the Press.

Dreamwork began in Princeton, New Jersey on 16 May 2002, and continued there, on trips, and in Edmonton, Alberta and Cambridge, England. On one of those voyages, I went to Yale and visited one of my teachers, Thomas M. Greene, a fine reader of poetry who was very ill. I remember him warmly here. Years before, he had talked to me about how Yves Bonnefoy combined being a poet and a critic.

The book was completed on 17 October 2002. A iter letting the volume sit for a long while (which is myusual way of working), I revised the poems.

I would like to express my gratitude to colleagues, staff, and students at Princeton University (2000 - 2002), particularly those connected with the Canadian Studies Program, the Department of History, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the hockey team; I wish to thank the President and Fellows of Clare Hall, Cambridge; I want to express thanks to students, staf, and colleagues at the University of Alberta, where I began to teach in January 1984. I am especially proud of students whom I tutored, supervised, or taught at Toronto, Alberta, Trent, Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, Sorbonne Nouvelle, and elsewhere for all their accomplishments in poetry, literature, history, and other fields.

To all those who encouraged or translated my poetry over the years, I give thanks. In this regard, I remember Robertson Davies, Robert Finch, Timothy Findley, and Douglas LePan and thank, among others, Alfred Alcorn, Sally Alcorn, Maria Athanasopoulou, Anne Barton, E. D. Blodgett, Di Brandt, John Buschek, Mary Baine Campbell, Sean Caulfield, Susan Colberg, Patricia Demers, Brian Edwards, Seamus Heaney, Robert Kroetsch, Nicole Mallet, Glenn Rollans, Jüri Talvet, Gordon Teskey, Nadezda Vashkevich, Fred Wah, and Robert Wilson.

To friends and family, more thanks. Others have inspired me for a long time: George Edward Hart, my father, is still writing into his mid nineties, and a painting by Jean Jackman Hart, my mother, appears posthumously as part of the cover design and in the book. My brothers and sisters, Charles, Gwendolyn, Deborah, Alan, and Jennifer have all been involved in their lives and careers with theatre, books, libraries, music, painting, architecture, ilm, and television. I salute my most impractical of families in this and earlier generations of painters, photographers, composers, musicians, and actors, amateur and professional.

To my wife, Mary Marshall, and our twins, Julia and James, I give deepest thanks.

Some along the way have asked me why I write poetry, and I ask why not.

jonathan locke hart

Summer 2009