stone, book one is rob mclennan's tenth book of poetry. Written in short, lyrical bursts, the piece follows a young couple meeting and awkwardly exploring in an unspecific rural place and time. The work inhabits an eroding landscape, one of family farms and the days before travel and communication made daily lives less about the land. There are traces of autobiography in stone elements taken from mclennan's own origins in Glengarry County, Eastern Ontario, but the vagueness that surrounds the piece is deliberate. This is not a historical collection, but a lyrical, emotional one. The first book of an open sequence, stone moves along the lines of other long poem forms. It is written following no true and steady course, but evolves into a process, and a language thick with physical elements of greenery and stone.
