Small Theatres

Mark Truscott is the author of three other books of poetry. His most recent collection, Branches, won the inaugural Nelson Ball Prize for “poetry of observation.” He lives in Toronto.

• A Poem 3Birds 7Leaves 8Next to Nothing 9Piano 10On Predication 11Sentences 12Real 13A Mundane Fantasy in Two Parts 14May 16On Description 17A Scene 18Like 19Closer 20An Annunciation 22The Cold 23Daydream 24Early 25A Sequence of Tenses 26The Lake 27Song 28Another Bird 29To Try Music 30On Appearance 31Others 32Place 33Cut Flowers 34A Neutral Light 35A Painted Room 36Our Pandemic 37Living Room 38Stanza 39Home 40A Depiction 41Piano 42A Glass 43End of Summer Song 44Smoke 45Ars 46The Simple Past 47Colour 48Shrub Doze 49The Origin of My Medium 50Home 51Crepuscule 53On Syntax 54Rain 55The Internet 56A Minor Devil 57Muskoka 58On the Axis of Contiguity 59Philtrum 60Vacation 62Glimpse 63Late 64The Sky over Alexander Muir/ Gladstone Public School 66Trinity Bellwoods Dog Bowl 67Christie Pits 68The Snow 69February 70A Diagram 71Water 72Plenum 73Spring 75Noted 76My Instrument 77Analogue 79Of the Poem 80Drift 81Interior 82Note to Self 83Contagion 84An Essay, a Fable 85Elegiac 86The Last Bird 87Acknowledgments 89

“Mark Truscott shapes the poems in Small Theatres with a sculptor’s eye, leaving precise, richly allusive panoramas where ‘[e]ach cut / [is] a sentence, each surface another shepherded day.’” - Jim Johnstone, author of The King of Terrors “ Truscott’s poems contain stillness that, like peering into a meshwork of bunchgrass, teems with subtle life. Densely reflective, keenly framed, and so finely tuned in its music, Small Theatres makes a ‘bower’ for deep attention – a lush, vibrant, ‘leafy shade’ wherein we can shelter and renew despite time’s ‘fickle yet absolute demands.’” - Neil Surkan, author of Empties “Mark Truscott’s Small Theatres is an impressive work of precision amid transformation, making metaphor of the ‘fiction of proximity / that fills the / world with objects / present to the / mind,’ and in so doing manifests John Donne’s seeing in ‘one little room an everywhere.’” - Edward Carson, author of twofold