Crispin Elsted is one of the most thoroughly talented humans I have ever met: poet, typographer, jazz musician, composer, consummate Shakespearean actor and theatrical director. Except that he cannot make coffee, I believe that he is a genuinely cultivated man. In the small world of the "private press" – the international community of people who make books the old way, setting the type, rolling the ink and printing the pages by hand, on handmade paper – Elsted is well known. He has published there for decades. In the sanitized world that the rest of us inhabit, where paper is made and books are printed (and sometimes it appears the text was written) by machines, Elsted has remained one of the best-kept secrets of Canadian culture. He belongs to an invisible minority: the devotees of genuine handwork, the servants of true craft.
His poems are handmade too. And like their author, they live happily outside what we like to call the mainstream – actually, perhaps a stagnant pond – of literary movements and schools. Open this book at any page and you will see that its author's style was not formed in the "creative writing department" of any modern university. It was formed in apple orchards, back lanes, libraries, gardens, and in barns where the live animals outnumber the tractor attachments. It was also formed on the concert stage, in the greenroom, in the jazz club and in small community halls.
How is one to read such an alien writer? With pleasure. With indulgence. With delight in his Elizabethan richness, his musicianship, his ignorance of fashion, his long reach and his sheer determination to live a human life despite the bottom line temptations to do otherwise. – Robert Bringhurst
