Bruce Hunter is a great Canadian poet and writer. In 2022 his book A Life in Poetry (based on his Two O’clock Creek - poems new and selected) was published in Italy. Bruce was deafened as a child and suffered from low vision for much of his adult life. He grew up in Calgary, in working-class Ogden, in the shadow of Esso's Imperial Oil refinery. After high school, he worked as a laborer, equipment operator, Zamboni driver, gardener, and arborist.
 
In his late twenties, his poems earned him a scholarship to the Banff School of Fine Arts. His poetry, fiction and creative essays have appeared in over 80 international blogs, magazines and anthologies in Italy, Canada, China, India, Romania, the United Kingdom, the United States. Among the various awards we remember, in 2010, the Acorn – Plantos Peoples’ Poetry Award for Canada. Bruce Hunter is a life member of the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association (C.H.H.A.) and the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (C.N.I.B.). Recently, in February 2023, a book of his verses entitled Galestro was released for the Quaderno del Bardo editions.
 
The title of the volume is emblematic. Galestro is a sandy soil, rich in minerals, found in the Chianti vineyards in Tuscany, where Bruce Hunter made a meditative journey. We humans are children of the stars. We are products of the collapsing stars; we are made of their stuff. As Carl Sagan writes, “the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were produced inside collapsing stars.”
 
The Blackfoot elder, Narcisse Blood is lovingly described by Hunter in his verse. We are the Star People, the sage Blackfoot elders say. They know that wine, clouds and atoms come from stellar particles. Star particles older than love. At night, outside the Star Peoples’ tents the horses neigh and the moon goes down.

​

The poet is a great soul. Galestro is dedicated to Lisa, his love, his star, and to their children, and grandchildren. At the opening of the book, there are some verses dedicated to Bruce by Fabio Strinati, Italian musician, and poet, who sketches with sensitivity, trees, fruit, rain, orchards in love, the beauty of Nature.
 
Scrolling through the verses of Galestro, one remains enchanted and favorably impressed by the magical description of the landscapes. We are struck by Hunter's attachment to Mother Earth, a primordial, childlike bond that brings an astonishing wonder. Hunter is a globe-trotting poet; nevertheless, with roots that are permanent, and intimately anchored to its land. Only those who are bound and viscerally close in a fraternal embrace to their native places can also uproot themselves if necessary and begin a loving journey towards other lands.
 
Galestro is a poetic journey through coveted, unharmed places. Hunter's style is conversational and familiar; his gait sometimes giving way to a more prosaic register. However, it is always great poetry. Which we could define as "anthropological poetry", full of history, of stories, of biology of human populations. The references to the myths are continuous. Galestro comes alive with a varied and very rich humanity. The sax man, while the trams mutter, is bent over a folding chair. He attacks a velvety “Take Five”. There is a humanity, in this book, teeming with beauty, like the uncle made deaf by a war time bomb.

And the road is the teacher of life. Here we meet Katie, a street person; a man with a steel hook for a hand, who pierces an apple to give it to his girlfriend. Jimmy and his buddy Roberto race in electric wheelchairs along opposite sides of the road. Gibson the blind man peddles sunglasses and waves to all the girls, shouting: “Baby, you are so beautiful I can smell it”. The homage of the poet to the Scottish grandmothers is moving. Their little houses smell of broth and camphor. Hunter's naturalistic culture is marked, meditated, practiced in the field. And in the verses it takes on a lyrical guise. The poet recalls the river and the beaver dam where he fished in Lynnwood in Ogden. Here, the house where his sister lived has been bulldozed; the vast albino prairie has disappeared, even the swamp, even their plants.
 
Four blocks from his childhood school sits the Esso refinery. Unfortunately, the anthropic and destructive hand of modern man does not take much care of the adamantine purity of Nature. In the verses, Hunter recalls his apprenticeship as a journeyman. He went in search of the mythical tool: the skyhook . To a Jewish woman he dedicates sensual words: In the sweet summer heat; the Ashkenazi girl squats on her tanned thighs in the soft garden soil, eats tomatoes stained by the night's rain, catching droplets with her tongue.
 
As we have already written, Hunter dedicates a wonderful poem to the memory of Narcisse Blood, also known as Middle Bull, elder of the Blackfoot/Kainai. The Star People really know about rain, about light, about the beginning of water, about love. The second part of Galestro is an uninterrupted song, especially dedicated to Tuscany. At the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, a lonely old man with rheumy eyes bows to Donatello's David. An amazed old man looks at the David. A beautiful young woman on a bicycle appears on the banks of the Arno. She looks like Ornella Muti. In the taverna, we meet the innkeeper Alice. The winemaker Francesco knows how to mediate rain and wine, alchemy and prayer. Cloud catchers capture the fog. And even above the villages of the Cinque Terre, Nature soars with its reddish love poppies (“Ligurian poppies shine like lights over the sea / they do not warn, they do not greet with their red goodbye”). “
 

Galestro is a collection of poems that opens up scenarios of the imagination. Bruce Hunter believes he travels in his dreams. "And the dreams in which I can see and hear everything./The road that always goes home, wherever I am." The dream is an existential and vital stratagem, necessary, indispensable, to make this ordinary and effective reality less harsh, less ruthless, still livable.

​

​

​

Marcello Buttazzo was born in Lecce and lives in Lequile, in the heart of the Valle della Cupa Salento. He studied Biology with population studies at the University "La Sapienza" of Rome. He has published numerous works, mostly poetry. He writes in prose for Spagine on current events. His publications include “And the dawn?" (Manni Editori), "Origami of words" (Pensa Editore), "Between the folds of red” (I Quaderni del Bardo Edizioni). His latest collection is "If I'll see you in yellow" (I quaderni del Bardo Edizioni, April 2023 ).