Vanishing Act

When Giles Blunt’s first crime novel appeared, the Toronto Star said it “immediately raises the bar of Canadian crime fiction.” TheGlobe and Mail calls him “a master storyteller,” and fans of Blunt’s fiction are familiar with his ability to shape a tense narrative for maximum impact. WithVanishing Act, his debut collection of verse, Blunt delivers equally potent strength and quality, opening up for the reader a new, “wicked pack of cards” – in that deck, a cast of characters that speak to the different stages of personal journey: coming of age, heartbreak, terrible loss, the fear of death, philosophical musing, and the personal apocalypse that may one day come… But more than anything, this rich sequence of poems is about how our personal identity changes over a lifetime. Blunt’s devotion to structure is on full display in this collection, from cinquains to sapphics, from ballad to blank verse. This is not dry intellectualism or a stumbling over spurious epiphanies. Rather, red-blooded passion and emotional dynamics drive us through a panorama of city streets, along open highways, across bridges that connect or sometimes fail, and onward to the beaches and fields and all the spaces in between where we may lose our way – or unexpectedly find ourselves.

Giles Blunt grew up in North Bay, Ontario. After studying English literature at the University of Toronto, he moved to New York City, where he lived for the next twenty years, before moving back to Toronto in 2002. His John Cardinal crime novels have been published in more than a dozen languages, and have won the British Crime Writers’ Silver Dagger Award, and the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis award for best novel (twice). Blunt has twice been nominated for the Dublin IMPAC award, a rarity for a crime writer, and was recently granted an honorary doctorate by Nipissing University. On Canada Day, 2014, the CBC numbered Forty Words for Sorrowamong the 100 novels that make us proud to be Canadian. His poems have appeared inGrain, Poetry Canada Review, and in an anthology edited by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.