Compulsory Figures

Who are the people who mark our lives? Must we know them personally or is influence also exerted from the distant past, the grave, or even from the pages of a book? Devastated by the sudden death of one of his sisters in 2015, award-winning poet John Barton, over the decade since, felt moved to answer these and other questions for himself in Compulsory Figures, his thirteenth collection of poems.

Born in the 1950s to parents who moved to Edmonton during the early years of the oil boom, Barton roots many of his poems in the prairie, foothills, mountain, and urban landscapes of his Alberta childhood—the land itself a formative influence—to ground his memories of his sister and of his parents, who divorced just as he was entering his twenties.

Barton broadens his inquiry to wrestle with larger societal forces, including settler colonialism and the role his ancestors played in Ontario and the Canadian West after their arrival in the nineteenth century. As a gay man who came to a full acceptance of himself during the AIDS pandemic, he also explores the stigmatizing impact of homophobia and how the courage of figures like Christopher Isherwood, Frank O’Hara, Paul Monette, and Robert Mapplethorpe continues to provide him solace and strength.

Lyrical and thought-provoking, Compulsory Figures plunges into the depths of history, grief, and the unshakable power of everyone and everything that shapes us.