Memorial Hall Borders

In October, I travelled to Fredericton, New Brunswick, for Ross Leckie’s Sixth Annual Poetry Weekend at the University of New Brunswick – or Leckiefest as I’m want to call it. Founded largely by accident, it’s the world’s most down-to-earth and dead-simple literary festival. Readers ranged from Leckie’s promising creative writing students to Griffin Prize winner A.F. Moritz. I met a pile of interesting writers. It was the first time I’d heard Sue Sinclair, Kevin Connolly or Zach Wells read, for example, or met Arc magazine’s Anita Lahey. I wasn't reading, but Gaspereau authors Michael deBeyer and Ross Leckie read, and Halifax poet Matt Robinson read from a letterpress-printed broadsheet he commissioned me to design and print for him. Gaspereau’s long-time proofreader, Christina McRae, was there too, reading from her new book published by Wolsak and Wynn. I can’t say enough good about this folksy little event.

One of the great things about Leckiefest is the venue. The readings were held in Memorial Hall on the campus of the University of New Brunswick. Built in 1924 to honour the 35 UNB Alumni who died in the First World War, Memorial Hall was originally designed as a science building. When my architect friend John Leroux heard that I would be spending the day in Memorial Hall, he raved about it and emphasized that I must check out the stained glass windows. (John, author of Building New Brunswick: An Architectural History, is a bit of an expert on New Brunswick’s built heritage.) And John was absolutely right. It’s an astonishing space. And the stained glass windows inspired me to design a new suite of typographic ornaments. John graciously went back to take some detail photos of the windows for me. This week, I completed a trail version of the font. No doubt I'll use these ornaments in some forthcoming Gaspereau projects.

Also this week, Gary and I, and my son Adam, knocked down some walls in the printshop in order to dedicate more room to letterpress printing. In this renovated space we will install two Vandercook proofing presses, an 1833 Albion press and perhaps a Chandler & Price or Pearl platen press or two, as well as type drawers and the composing stone. Gathering these tools together from various corners of the shop where they are presently dispersed will effectively create a quiet, well-lit letterpress studio – a better place for printing and perhaps eventually for teaching as well.

ANDREW STEEVES ¶ PRINTER & PUBLISHER

Poetic & Typographic Form

This is the opening poem from Ross Leckie’s collection Gravity’s Plumb Line. One of the things I like about Leckie’s work is the way in which it often employs and yet flexes the boundaries of formalism, and this was something I tried to embody in the book’s design. I set the book using a type based on the neoclassical letterforms of John Baskerville (1706–75), types whose structure and tradition were in sympathy with the poetic structures and traditions present in Leckie’s own poems. At the same time, I subverted Baskervillian formalism on the jacket, cover and title page, employing a playfulness lifted directly from Leckie. This particular poem is from a suite about New Brunswick’s Saint John River, which descends from Little St. John Lake to the Atlantic poem by poem. It is reprinted in the poetry anthology Gaspereau Gloriatur, Volume 1.


Little St. John Lake
Ross Leckie

The frowzy lake covered with weed
is merely a little spilled water,
afterthought to an afternoon’s rain.

It is a cloudy day, the clouds touched
just once lightly in purple ink.
The mosquitoes will be out later.

French and English spill over this
splash of greeny brown and murky
green. Or they would if anyone

were here—they do back in St. Aurelie
where the leak of water trickling north
briefly marks a border between

Québec and Maine. But this is the
place where it all begins, the lake
a crystal pitcher tipping its liquid

into a trick of evening light.
Brackish, shallow, a seep through
the furze and spindly spruce, it moves

as if it has all the time in the world—
and it does; a foot sinks in the soft mud,
icy water slips over the lip of your boot.

Copyright © Ross Leckie, 2005