Ghost Camps

Many centuries ago, at a time when the people of Ireland were bing converted, much as the native people of Canada were converted, the high king was presured by Christian missionaries to rid the country of its poet whom they considered to be a troublesome pagan lot. But one native Irish priest intervened, arguing that to banish the poets would be a national disaster. They were, with their heads full of visions from the past, the true wealth of the nation. They served a powerful...
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Many centuries ago, at a time when the people of Ireland were bing converted, much as the native people of Canada were converted, the high king was presured by Christian missionaries to rid the country of its poet whom they considered to be a troublesome pagan lot. But one native Irish priest intervened, arguing that to banish the poets would be a national disaster. They were, with their heads full of visions from the past, the true wealth of the nation. They served a powerful social function and preserved the most ancient history of their people.

We, too, need our poets. Our own ability as a nation to learn the past and map the future for Canada is far more tentative and uncertain than we might like to believe. To understand where we think we are going in an incoherent world with its murky possibilities, we must first attempt to discern where it is we think we have come from. With this eloquent book, Stephen Hume, poet, journalist, anthropologist, has become -- whether he asked to be or not -- our poet in the ancient tradition. Hume retells our history in clear lyrical prose. We will be the richer and the wiser for undersanding our past and those events in that past which establish the icons of our moral landscape.