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The least important man was a boy in the 1970s. He remembers clubhouses, plastic soldiers, swimming lessons, rocket launches, a grandfather’s letters from World War I. Those days are long gone, however: now the least important man is grown up. He lives in the city. He suffers endless rush hours, he dreams of other places, he drinks cheap coffee and crosses streets and sees explosions on the TV news. But through it all he’s still thinking about that old life, and wondering what it meant, and asking in his quiet way how he might reconcile two such transient worlds with each other.
The Least Important Man is the second collection from Gerald Lampert Prize-winning poet Alex Boyd: sober, self-sacrificing, and handsome, it’s a book for those who want poetry to reassert its dignity and authority in everyday life.
Alex Boyd is the author of Making Bones Walk (Luna Publications 2007) and the winner of the Gerald Lampert Award. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.
"Consistently strong. Boyd's images and metaphors are deft." - Winnipeg Free Press
"The poet can work magic in miniature: poems about chess pieces, toy soldiers, and house spiders each animate aspects of civic and personal life ... 'Basil Rathbone Meets God,' 'A Stuntman Destroys the Hate Window,' 'Samuel Drowns, at Thirty' and others are among the book's most beautiful and surprising. By the end of the collection I was able to count a number of these standouts. And man, that is important."—Quill & Quire
Alex Boyd: Alex Boyd is the author of Making Bones Walk (Luna 2007), the editor of Northern Poetry Review, and the co-founder of the Best Canadian Essays series; Making Bones Walk won the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry. Boyd writes for the Globe & Mail and lives in Toronto.
The Least Important Man
A Glimpse Of My Bright Life in the Morning
1977
To a Businessman At Rush Hour
The Balding Man Feels the Music
Canada Day Snapshot, 2004
Someday the Men With Hats Will Go
And the Morning Brings Rush Hour
Two Thirteen Line Poems on How We Need a New Poem
Formula For the Body and the Bullet
How Words Feel
Captain Kirk Love Poem
Rod Serling’s Funeral, 1975
Brick and Bone
The Culture of Shyness
Notes on a Small World
Remembrance Day, 2001
Undersea
Homage to Everything
In Place
First World Wars
Dream
Dead Bees Are Indomitable
Vesta Lunch
Eyes Only Know How to Steal
The Weight of a Fool
Firenze
Elementary
Summit
Around One: Late Friday Subway Notes
The Dignity Machine
Eric the Swimmer
For All Undone Things
Instinct
Mama Spider
The Echo of Isaac Brock
At Forty
Moving Into History
Poem In the Sun
Uncertain, Texas
Little Green Men
Basil Rathbone Meets God
Tomorrow at Ten
For One Second at Midnight
Samuel Drowns, at Thirty
I Just Have to Get Through This
Orwell Robot
A Stuntman Destroys the Hate Window
No One On the Streetcar
Swallowed