The least important man was a boy in the 1970s. He remembers clubhouses, plastic soldiers, swimming lessons, rocket launches, a grandfather’s letters from World War I. Those days are long gone, however: now the least important man is grown up. He lives in the city. He suffers endless rush hours, he dreams of other places, he drinks cheap coffee and crosses streets and sees explosions on the TV news. But through it all he’s still thinking about that old life, and wondering what it meant, and asking in his quiet way how he might reconcile two such transient worlds with each other.
The Least Important Man is the second collection from Gerald Lampert Prize-winning poet Alex Boyd: sober, self-sacrificing, and handsome, it’s a book for those who want poetry to reassert its dignity and authority in everyday life.
Alex Boyd is the author of Making Bones Walk (Luna Publications 2007) and the winner of the Gerald Lampert Award. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.