Sean Howard’s new collection, Overlays (Gaspereau Press, 2025) collects “fresh poems from the deep wells of two related texts—John Thompson’s influential poetry collection Stilt Jack (1978) and Peter Sanger’s Sea Run (Gaspereau Press, 2023), a critical commentary on Thompson’s [work].” Howard synthesizes these sources with his own experimental and expressive injections of shapes, sounds, and silence. The main section of the book, “Annotations to Stilt Jack,” is organized as a mirror image of Thompson’s original work. He includes poems that represent Stilt Jack’s epigraphs and Thompson’s own preface, then 38 poems corresponding numerically to Thompson’s original 38 untitled ghazals.
Jack Keating: What about John Thompson’s Stilt Jack and Peter Sanger’s Sea Run captured your attention enough for them to be the focus of this project?
Sean Howard: My original intention was to write a short sequence, or set of fragments, as a way to thank Peter Sanger for his admirable book on Stilt Jack, Sea Run. I have written poetic responses to Peter’s work before, both poetry and prose, and wanted to test myself again this way. From the beginning I wanted to ‘mix’ his book with material from Stilt Jack itself, as well as—as is customary for me—material from my wider reading, my life, and my psyche (waking and dreaming), but just selectively, not in the comprehensive manner that you summarize.
However, it soon became clear that the work wanted to go somewhere else. It was generating a current of imagery, ideas and emotions that quickly turned into a stream both rushing and meandering in its course (run to the sea). I have not ever quite had a sensation of such intensity, an often frightening sense of being in various presences, not just Peter’s and Thompson’s, but all the presences—literary, mythic, archetypal, religious, natural, supernatural—their own work invokes and is open to. And then the quest was on…
JK: What led you to choose Cape Breton as a destination when you moved to Canada?
SH: On the question of what led me to Cape Breton the answer is a who, my wife Lee-Anne Broadhead, a Canadian who I met at the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, UK, and then was appointed as political science professor at Cape Breton University. She is also a peace (and environmental) activist, and one of my most important, perceptive, constructive and conscientious readers, along with a few close friends including the poet and essayist Peter Sanger, the leading scholar and authority on Thompson, who introduced me to his word-world.
JK: Like John Thompson, you made your way from England to Canada, ending up in the Maritimes. Thompson taught at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, and you teach at Cape Breton University as an adjunct professor. Are there other ways you see your life and your writing aligning with Thompson’s?
SH: I wouldn’t say I feel aligned with Thompson in my life journey or my poetic journey—I earlier called it a poetic ‘quest,’ but I wonder what Thompson might have made of such a bold word. I think he would have found it appropriate in evoking the vital connections between poetry, myth, and religion—the three main dimensions of his work and important in mine—but for that same reason he may have thought it suspicious in its Yeatsian grandeur and pretension.
Thompson had, as you know, a love-hate relationship with Yeats’ poetry, or rather it engendered a profound ambivalence in him, perhaps a fear of it infecting his work with its voice, blocking his path to his own poetic voice. I mention all this here just to give an example of the way I think of—and sense—Thompson in many ways and contexts since I wrote (on some level, with him) Overlays. It’s a pervasive presence-as-absence, a double-movement that I think characterizes Stilt Jack and, certainly, Overlays. Though again, I don’t feel this is an alignment as much as a resonance (or just overlap!).
We have some intellectual interests in common, I think. For example, in Jungian psychology, and thus also, presumably, in dreams—and dreamscape forms of poetry; in his case, the ghazal, and, in mine, haiku. And there are the basic biographical parallels you draw, with the major difference that Thompson studied and taught literature, and I have concentrated instead on politics, the politics of war and peace in particular. Exploring the deep links between peace and poetry is, I’d say, my dominant creative concern, which I don’t feel was the case with Thompson.
JK: There was no shortage of conflict in Thompson’s life, having survived the Blitz as an infant, then struggling with addiction and clashing with authority as an adult. The emotional turbulence naturally made its way into his work. Earlier in your life you spent a decade researching nuclear disarmament and international conflict, then four years ago you released Unrecovered: 9/11 Poems, Then As Now (Gaspereau Press, 2021). How much does your work as a peace activist influence your poetry?
SH: I’m still deeply involved in the anti-nuclear movement, as an academic, an activist, and—as Peter kindly says in his Afterword to Overlays—as a poet. The Bomb, alas, is everywhere. It is what the philosopher Timothy Morton calls a ‘hyperobject’: the damn thing is larger-than-Life, or will be when nuclear war breaks out, as seems increasingly likely (though I believe the only real alternative to that Apocalypse, a nuclear-weapon-free world, is still possible to achieve).
As I say, I don’t sense the same preoccupation/obsession in Thompson’s work or life, where the conflicts that concerned him were indeed more personal and professional. I’ve had some such struggles, too, of course, including sometimes drinking too much, as well as a general struggle to cope with aspects of ‘normal life’ (bureaucracy, airports and flying, driving, noise, technology, etc.). As a young man and writer, I didn’t think I’d be able to ‘cope’—especially with the nuclear fear—much longer, certainly not as long as I have (I’m now 60). Then I was, as Wordsworth wrote, “surprised by joy” at finding The Angel of Poetry (in my mid-teens) and then Lee-Anne.
JK: Thompson prefaces Stilt Jack with a note on the ghazal form and how ghazal couplets have “to be listened to as a song: its order is clandestine.” The subtitle of your book, (Scored Poems), alludes to musical accompaniment. Did you have music in mind as you wrote Overlays? Is there a soundtrack you think would pair especially well with your work?
SH: Thompson achieves and performs his own overlaying of texts by means of the ghazal, an extraordinary form of trickster-devotional poetry raised to dizzying heights, mainly by Persian and Urdu poets working in the mystic Islamic Sufi tradition, from the ninth to the 14th centuries (and beyond). In his introduction to Stilt Jack, Thompson writes of the ghazal that it “proceeds by couplets which (and here, perhaps, is the great interest in the form for western writers) have no necessary logical, progressive, narrative, thematic (or whatever) connection.”
Ghazals are very jazzy, and jazz—another dreamscape, shapeshifting, hallucinogenic form—is the music I love and listen to most, though I can only play it metaphorically, in my poetry. Though there is an honourable tradition of setting poems to music (that is what hymns are, after all) I don’t think my, or most, poetry needs a soundtrack but should rather make its own music.
When I am writing verse, I feel that in this sense I am composing it—as well, in the case of Overlays, as mixing in and jazzing up other music—and I read the poems out loud as they take shape. Pun intended, a poem has to be sound in this double sense, and must include, through reading aloud, the body and the breath of the poet in the process of making the words ‘sing.’
JK: Many of your poems feature or end with questions. They enhance the allusive, dreamlike quality of the whole collection where associations that seemed tenuous or unclear in the moment become stronger the more the reader considers them. Are these remnants of Peter Sanger’s investigation of Stilt Jack, the speaker’s personal reflections, or your own curiosity surfacing?
SH: For Thompson, Sanger, and myself, writing poetry (dreaming while awake, to paraphrase Charles Lamb) is walking in an infinite or holographic field of allusions, associations, images, symbols, etc. The ‘trick’ (as the ‘field’ can sometimes suddenly feel like a tightrope, sky-high) is to keep walking, absorbing those influences without thinking too much or too clearly about where they start and stop. You need, in short, what Keats famously called “negative capability,” to become the moment you’re in, with the temporary loss of clearly defined, positively (separately) there self.
You can’t be positive about anything in a ghazal or haiku or John Coltrane solo, except in the sense of being sure something mysteriously important is going on, something real that really demands your deepest, self-effacing attention. And readers certainly don’t need to ‘get’ or have read all the texts being alluded to: Dante and Shakespeare, for example, permeate Overlays, but I hope you can still find Overlays rewarding without having read either of them: as long, as you say, that the reader keeps ‘considering’ what is going on, in the poetry and in their own quest to understand it.
JK: Shifting gears from the conceptual to the concrete, the feel of Overlays’ handpressed cover and fine quality pages makes for incredibly tactile reading sessions. As I read your collection, I found myself returning to many examples of rich texture in the imagery of your poems. “Hands” contains the lines: “breakers making / tideline salt: apples, wild // rose wind,” and “Quills slow across / this snow,” evoking delicate, natural shapes and sense impressions. What senses do you aim to convey in your work? Are there specific sensations or experiences that profoundly affect or inspire you?
SH: I think the sensory, sometimes sensuous, quality of my work—which gives it its charge, its interwoven ethos and Eros—comes from cultivating the ‘negative capability’ I spoke of earlier: being open to, in touch with, the external and internal world, a process opposite to ‘Othering;’ a ‘selving’ of other realities, beings, presences, silences.
I recently completed a collaborative project with the outstanding young Canadian-Ukrainian poet Anna Veprinska, who taught briefly at Cape Breton University. We called our book Sense Verse—poetry as the opposite of nonsense—and we explored, in an exchange of 50 poems, different ways poetry works in alliance with, and to heighten, our physical and other senses, as well as asking the formidable questions: what sense can poetry make of our spiralling time and hideously violated world: what sense does it make to make poems anymore?
JK: Overlays is your seventh book released by Gaspereau Press. At the end of 2025, Gary Dunfield and Andrew Steeves will retire from the iconic Nova Scotian publisher. Their signature printing and binding processes will end, but the name and catalogue will live on with new ownership. Why has it been important to you that your work was physically produced in this unique way? How would your books have been different had someone else published them?
SH: In any Gaspereau book of poetry, the book is part of the poetry, as well as a sensory and aesthetic form of poetry itself. And when a book, like Overlays, is in a serious way about books and senses, that collaboration between publisher and poet, as well that relationship between page and poem, becomes even more intense and important. In truth, four people ‘made’ Overlays: Thompson, Peter, me, and Andrew Steeves.
I should add that one book of mine in particular, The Photographer’s Last Picture (2016), would not have been published by anyone else, in Canada or elsewhere. The book ‘develops’ twenty photographs from the Great War into poems, via prose. Each ‘development’ takes a long time, though the end results—the poems—are just micro fragments. The integration of image and text was a painstaking labour of love, running to 378 pages: I know Andrew enjoyed, and certainly rose to, the challenge, but it was quite absurd that he agreed to!
JK: Your poem “shadowgraph 52: such a small splitting” was included in the 2017 anthology The Best of The Best Canadian Poetry in English. What was it like to be recognized alongside Maritime poets like George Elliot Clarke and Anne Compton?
SH: I admire and respect Anne Compton, but I’d had the honour—and experience!—of reading alongside the great George Elliott Clarke, so it was quite a feeling to see our work also on the same ‘stage’ in the book.
JK: Could you share one or two of your favourite contemporary Maritime poets that you feel deserve more national (and international) recognition?
SH: The poet and essayist Anita Lahey is not a Maritime poet, but her family hails from Cape Breton, in fact Main-à-Dieu, and she visits most summers and at other times. She’s written very powerfully about people and events in the village, including a fire that devastated most of it in the 1970s. Her work is wonderful, as is that of Basma Kavanagh, a Nova Scotia poet with roots in both Cape Breton and Lebanon. Both Anita and Basma have received recognition and are highly regarded by their peers, but they deserve still wider audiences, in and beyond Canada.
JK: Your home community has a listed population of 242 and is widely known as a major centre for lobster fishing in the Maritimes. Without igniting any local disputes, can you tell me who cooks the best lobster tail in Main-à-Dieu?
SH: Believe it or not, I don’t eat lobster!
JK: That’s very diplomatic of you, Sean. Thank you for your time!
This interview was produced in collaboration with the English Department of the University of the Fraser Valley
Sean Howard is the author of seven collections of poetry in Canada, most recently Overlays (2025). His work has been widely published in Canada, the US, UK and elsewhere, and featured in The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English (2017). Howard is a peace researcher and activist, and adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University. He lives in Main-à-Dieu, Cape Breton.
Publisher: Gaspereau Press (Feb 3, 2025)
Paperback 8″ x 5″
ISBN: 9781554472765
Jack Keating is a student of English and Creative Writing at the University of the Fraser Valley. His work has been published in Pearls, Louden Singletree, and the chapbook, Brave Voices. He works as a writing tutor at Douglas College and lives in Port Coquitlam, BC.
