Viewed From the Keel of a Canoe explores, in Charles Wright’s words, “language, landscape, and the idea of God.” These poems, rooted in a Southern aesthetic, weave together the violence of the rural world with the resonance of the King James Bible. Fathers and Grandfathers cut through the gothic haze to provide a vision backwards in time and forward into the future. Interpreting all and grounding all is the memory and imagination of the poet. In his poem, If it were not so, I would have told you, Boyleston writes: “Memory, Imagination, no one comes to the father, but through me.” The poems in Viewed from the Keel of a Canoe affirm this stand.

J. Matthew Boyleston is the Associate Provost for Academic Technology and former Dean of the School of Fine Arts at Houston Baptist University. He holds a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston and a received an M.F.A. from the University of South Carolina. He has taught at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania and at the Malahide Language School in Dublin, Ireland. His poems and essays have appeared widely in such journals as Confrontation, the Spoon River Poetry Review, Blackwell’s Companion to Creative Writing and Puerto del Sol. He lives in Houston with his wife and two daughters.

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