Tasting the Earth

We all of us know that the ordinary every-day man and woman, the people we brush against in street cars, the people who read the funnies - the people who are like us - are capable of the profoundest depths of feeling and the noblest aspirations. But it is only on the rarest occasions that we happen to see one of them at it, so to speak, and when we do we have a certain sense of shame at intruding on something that really should be private between him and his God.

The artist enables us to see this ordinary man and woman in the moments when they are not ordinary, without any of this sense of intrusion. I think Mona Gould, in most of the verses in this volume, has been exceptionally successful in this kind of revelation, and I think Canada needs it. A number of these verses have been published in "Saturday Night" during the term of my editorship, and I am very glad that they are now to have a more permanent resting place.