These poems navigate contrary states: experience and innocence; loss and ecstasy; restraint and lyric outpouring. MacKenzie’s ominous wrong dark ravine/…wrong dark wind is set against the buoyant romantic: I shall Errol Flynn my way into your heart. The reader of Bob MacKenzie’s poems will discover a striking range of poetic form and human experience. MacKenzie writes in Beyond Convergence: The Whistle Dying, of Gods we dream no more. Don’t let the air of resignation fool you - there is ample resonant dreaming in MacKenzie’s poetry.
Jeanette Lynes, Author of Archive of the Undressed
Agape Heaven & Earth celebrates Bob MacKenzie’s 50 year career writing and publishing poetry in Canada, featuring 148 selected poems from 1965 to the present.
Reviewer John Ambury writes:
Bob MacKenzie is a highly respected poet and lyricist living in Kingston, Ontario. His immense talent, prolific output, and public readings have already earned him recognition well beyond his local area. Now, this excellent volume will firmly establish his ranking among the most outstanding contemporary poets in Canada.
MacKenzie has published earlier collections, including collaborations. What makes Agape Heaven & Earth so different and exceptional is its scope. Not a snapshot of a period in the writer"s development, this sweeping aggregation is a curated album of his whole poetic existence to date: a retrospective (for an artist almost too young to have one). It contains 148 poems, carefully chosen from the many hundreds he has written over 50 years - a full five decades. The album’s pages are not in chronological order; they are arranged according to motifs, both spiritual and worldly. He observes that during the selection process: I discovered themes and resonances that I had never noticed before. The result is a sumptuously-laid buffet of both simple and layered meanings, presented through a brilliant kaleidoscope of language.
MacKenzie writes from both his heart and his mind, guided by how his inspirations spark, emerge, and take shape. One result is that his poems span the entire range of accessibility, from straightforward expressions to obscure imaginings. With apologies for neither - the former pieces are never trite, the latter ones never pretentious. Proficient with metre and rhyme as well as informal structure, he has an acute ear for what forms best express what ideas.
Bob Mackenzie’s poetry is insightful and emotional, intelligent and honest. And eclectic: his subjects are as wide-ranging as the entire experience of being sentient. He finds unique personal inspiration everywhere: in literary and historical allusions, in the wonders of the natural world, in philosophy, and - most of all - in that deep and boundless source of distilled feelings, human relationships.
