UPEI professor emeritus Brent MacLaine launches new poetry collection

Prometheus Reconsiders Fire, a new book of poetry by Dr. Brent MacLaine, will be launched at a public event on Wednesday, May 25, at 7:30 p.m., in the North River Fire Hall’s Ember Room.

A native of PEI, MacLaine is professor emeritus and a 3M Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at UPEI. In addition to numerous academic articles on modern literature, he has published four volumes of poetry. His awards for poetry include a League of Canadian Poets prize, the Prince Edward Island Book Award, and the Atlantic Poetry Prize.

In Prometheus Reconsiders Fire, MacLaine undertakes an exploration of fire. The title poem establishes Prometheus as the poet’s persona, a voice that is dedicated to the reconsideration of fire in both its benevolent and malevolent aspects. Formal and elegant, Prometheus plots a trajectory between the classical and the local, a bearing that will be familiar to readers of MacLaine’s earlier work, Athena Becomes a Swallow.

Wide-ranging in its geography, the new book is wrapped ’round by “The Fire Hall Suite,” which begins and ends the book. The poems in the collection respond to the “drive-by wisdom” created by the anonymous “Sign Person” who speaks to the local community by way of the fire hall’s roadside sign. Framed by the “Suite,” the poems of Prometheus move between city and country. A naturalist in the city, MacLaine brings to the urban environment the acutely observing eye that has always characterized his Island nature poems. The book is published by Nimbus Publishing.

Everyone is invited to attend the launch of Dr. MacLaine’s newest book. The Ember Room is upstairs in the North River Fire Hall, Trans Canada Highway, North River, PEI.

Congratulations, Dr. MacLaine!