About
Bruce Hunter

In January, 2025 Bruce was interviewed for Fare Voci magazine about his presence in Italy. “I fell in love with her in sixth grade and my mind and heart were captured forever after my first visit in 2012, one week after I retired. It opened a whole new phase in my life as I say here. Grazie, caro amici.”

​

Poetry also comes from Canada, with Bruce Hunter and his “Galestro”, and in the interview about him he tells us all about his fascination for his homeland and Italy. And the dialect is the protagonist of the poetry of Ezio Solvesi and his “Tutintùn”.

 

The fascination with jazz musicians, I think, fuels the entire book. Both from a devotion to their music-making, and from the breadth that his writing shares with jazz-making. Is that so?

Thank you so much for your insightful and generous commentary. YES. Jazz (and blues) is poetry to the musical mind. Like poetry, jazz covers the gamut of the human psyche and musicality, from pain to rhapsody, from euphony to cacophony. Channeled through New Orleans, American jazz combines European harmonics and African rhythms.

All forms of poetry emerge in jazz and blues: lyric, narrative, drama, dialogue, both formal and overt. Whether it is the plaintive voice of a lone saxophonist on a street corner calling to us or the African griot rising amid the cacophony of village life around him. Like poetry, jazz invites us into the world, with a fusion of all the sounds of life.

My last poem in “Galestro”, “The Rooks in the Sycamores at the Tomb at Dunn” is a sort of jazz fusion using mythology, literature, botany, anthropology, etymology, family and social history as both story, lyrics, puns, dialogue, verse, Scottish and Gaelic dialect. As is my title poem in Galestro, about Tuscany, its history and its dialect. I share a musician’s obsession with skill and tone. In both English and Italian.

​

Two subjects that feature prominently in “Galestro” are childhood and nature. What do they have in common? And what is so important about them?

History, nature, and childhood are themes that run through my life from early childhood to today. Long before I formally studied botany, I was introduced to tree planting by a teacher who gave our middle school class green spruce saplings in baby food containers as Arbor Day gifts.

I planted my first tree when I was eight, then planted dozens as my brothers and sisters brought them home. More than sixty years later, those trees still stand in my parents’ old yard. My parents and siblings are gone now, but those sturdy green spruce feathers stand tall.

I studied horticulture and arboriculture in college before receiving a poetry scholarship to graduate school. In my apprenticeship as a gardener I learned the universal language of plants, soil and time, which I have never forgotten and which remains one of the powerful links between past and present, earth and sky, in my life and in my writing.

​

Another significant aspect is his attention to the history of the places he talks about. How important is this attitude of his? Is it to indicate the way in which one should relate and approach them?

I first fell in love with Italy in elementary school, after studying a chapter dedicated to the Greek and Roman wars. Then I found a National Geographic photo reportage of the excavations of Pompeii, where archaeologists discovered the perfectly preserved body of a boy my age who was running an errand for his mother; at that moment, history became something personal. I was that boy trapped in time.

Later, I studied Latin in high school and still later, as a college professor, I taught the children of postwar immigrants from southern Italy. One and a half million Italians, most of them from the south, live in Canada.

Like me, many of my students were the first in their working-class families to get a higher education. But I must admit that, as a simple tourist in Italy, I was initially nervous to write about Italy's rich and storied history.

In Italy, history surrounds us and teaches us all, if we let it. I always come to Italy with an open heart and mind because I believe that when we travel we come back young and vulnerable.

We are all tourists, temporary visitors, wherever we are on this earth. We become different people when we respond to a new place we encounter, just like my newborn nephew exploring our garden.

From new experiences, from vulnerability, spring images are born that often connect the past with the new and unknown.

​

Because then in these pages he builds a real geography of places. And I ask, is the journey the tool to unite them? To bring them closer together? And what meaning does he give to the concept of travel?

My short answer is that adventure and wonder unite the poems wherever they are set. I am lucky to have a companion in adventures, my wife Lisa, who is a lifelong traveler and a photographer. For her, travel is all about images and the surprising wonder of discovery. For me, it is the images, even the wonder, and the stories, the jokes, the quips that underline the journey. My poems always speak of people, of land and history.

We have been lucky enough to visit much of Italy, Turin, Cinque Terre, Alba, Umbria, Salento, Amalfi Coast and more. How much beauty and variety there is in the Italian regions, each with its own charm, its own dialect and foods that are unique.​

 

Consequently, it seems important to me to underline how, from “Galestro”, the thought emerges that the road is a real school of life. Is this correct?

Absolutely. The road, or the journey of my life, began like for many others, I was inspired by the novel “On the Road – Sulla strada” by the American Jack Kerouac. With my high school friend we hitchhiked for 3000 kilometers from Calgary, Alberta, to San Francisco.

The road then as now is the unrecognized classroom of life. On the road we are free, we travel light, but vulnerable and open to whatever happens. Which is a state of grace from which poetry and art are born. My friend and I slept in ditches along the roads, in the forests and once in a sandy cemetery in the desert in Winnemucca, Nevada. The dead are good neighbors! Rattlesnakes neither.

Often strangers would take us to their homes, these two young Canadians in plaid wool jackets, looking thin, young and rough.

We spent a night in the abandoned Tenderloin of San Francisco, as Kerouac and Jack London had done. We met teachers, preachers, truck drivers, a traveling Bible salesman, a Coast Guardsman—all good people who were willing to give us a meal, a bed, or a ride.

Alas, we were two years too late for the Summer of Love, but because of literature we went in search of great adventures that taught us, in so many ways. This was my life.

​

“Galestro” also looks to the past, to the time that was. And the memory of past friendships is alive. How can we live with it?

Buddhists believe that we tend to all our emotions, our fears, our pain, the same way we tend to a garden. Pain, for example, stops the soul, but in poetry we honor it together with the loved one and give it a special place in the garden of the psyche.

As a young man I worked as a gardener in a cemetery and saw how it was not a place of death but a vibrant celebration of life. And often it is also a place of great generosity and beauty, of plants and animals drawn to a lush green Eden in the middle of a city.

I was deeply moved to see visitors at the graves of their loved ones. Some came with children who left letters, little gifts for their loved one. All around us were many creatures and above us birds nesting in the tall trees that adorned the graves. This was all poetry to me.

​

In these poems of yours, what form does Canada emerge? And what is the Canada that you like?

I am drawn to the wilderness, the wilderness, the beaten path, the Dolomites, the mountainous places like where I grew up in Alberta. It is where the prairies rise to the foothills and the snow-capped Canadian Rockies, where the weather comes in from the West Coast.

Canada is a vast country, the second largest after Russia, 10 million square kilometers with about 40 million people, the inverse of Italy’s 300,000 square kilometers with 60 million people. Canada has many vibrant, diverse and distinct regions and cultures, but it is always the mountains, here and in Italy, that I return to. To quote my poem “ Two O’clock Creek ” from “A Life in Poetry”:

​

…every year
since I learned what rivers look like,
this is the place I come to in my dreams
between the highest point on earth and the sky,
so I can drink from the clouds.

​

The poem is about Canada, but I feel the same way about Italy. This poem was the “seed” for my new publication in Italy, the novel “Nella casa dell'orso”, coming out in December 2024, by iQdB edizioni of Lecce.

 

There is also a complete and total fascination with Tuscany, which becomes a true synonym for beauty. What does it mean to you?

I have been fortunate to travel extensively in Italy from north to south, to cities large and small: Turin, Alba, Rapallo, Pisa, Florence, Siena, Cortona, Rome, Naples, Sorrento, Capri, Matera and Lecce.

But my first deep connection with the people and places was in Chianti, where I recognized a soil very similar to the one where I grew up, in the southern foothills of Alberta with a view of the Canadian Rockies and in the arid prairies, but rich in agriculture against all odds… We stayed at a farmhouse outside Castellina, in Chianti. One morning I went to the vineyard to taste some of that unique soil, the schist, which in Tuscan dialect I learned is called galestro, and which flavors the best wines of the region.

In college I learned to test the soil for mineral qualities and vitality for the crops. The winemaker saw me do this, and so the next day we visited his land and his winery.

The title poem of “Galestro” comes from that experience. The land and the tour with the winemaker inspired my book. There was immediate recognition.

Later a Tuscan friend of mine told me that galestro is the earth that scares, and that by dipping your hands in it, it sanctifies them. Of course this is something every gardener and farmer knows.

The soil, the product of ancient fallen stars, is what gives life to every living creature. And it has been since the beginning of time. What’s not to love? New places awaken buried memories.

My poems in “Galestro” mix childhood and history. In Italy where the destruction of the last great war is visible if you look. I feel like I’m always coming home to my home, every time I go back.​​