"Mark Dickinson's Canadian Primalis a decisive event in Canadian literary criticism, comparable to Margaret Atwood's Survival and Northrop Frye's The Bush Garden. Dickinson brings us the lives and achievements of five great poets who sing powerfully of what philosophy has forgotten, which is how to live intensely when the life around us, even as it suffocates, is nearer to our spirit than it has been for millennia." Gordon Teskey, Harvard University.