Over the past few decades, a group of writers we might call the Thinking and Singing poets have stood at the forefront of poetry in Canada. These five poets – Dennis Lee, Don McKay, Robert Bringhurst, Jan Zwicky, and Tim Lilburn – are major voices in an era of ecological devastation and spiritual unease. Their diverse, questioning work suggests new ways to confront some of the most pressing issues of our time.

In vibrant prose, Mark Dickinson explores the relationship between the lives of these poets and their writing, examining their intersecting careers and friendships, and the ways they learned from and challenged one another. Canadian Primal uses an unconventional approach, blending biography with literary analysis and drawing from meetings and correspondence with each poet over many years to trace the people and events that inspired the creation of important texts. Dickinson tracks how each of the writers arrived at poetry as a way of being, and at the heart of their poetics he finds both a musical intelligence and the crucial importance of the land.

Canadian Primal is literary biography reconceived as an adventure of the mind, body, and spirit. Ebullient, intelligent, and eminently readable, it reminds us that we can live on the earth in a different way, true to the defining experiences of our lives, surrounded by meaning and presence beyond our imagining.