WAKE UP HILL ROAD, NOVA SCOTIA

Home has been for some years on a twisty little road that snakes into the woods, and you don’t know anyone lives here until you’re halfway up.  It starts and ends on a precarious bend in a highway, and you must be alert when you make your turn, and that’s why they called it Wake Up Hill.

My name is David L Conrad, and I’ve been writing poetry for almost fifty years and publishing it sporadically in journals. But I intend to put all of my poems fit to read on this site, and I hope you will enjoy them. I have recently published my first books of poems, Wake Up Hill Poems, New and Collected.

There is a recent collection of my poetry, titled  Fast Poems in the poetry section. It is a narrative poem divided into forty parts, one for each day of the Christmas Fast.  It observes the effect of fasting on a modern, self-centered glutton, not used to sacrificing his wants for any reason.  Why he started the fast is not readily apparent.  We can only guess it started when his simple and child-like faith in atheism began to crumble, both in the face of terror and in the rising visions of nature’s beauty.

The other menu tab is a selection of my poems from the late sixties to the present, old friends I might have left behind.  There is the tab  New Poems, ongoing, of my latest poems.

Hidden away are drafts of novels, which I co-author with my wife and partner, JoAnne Conrad, are set in a very distant and early Rome, before she became the rapacious, powerful juggernaut in history that we read about,  Rome, not JoAnne, and we have tried to imagine and record the comings and goings of people trying to survive in a very turbulent and tough time.

That Rome wasn’t built in a day is the cliche, but like most cliches, it is rooted in truth, for the Eternal City was constructed piece by bloody piece by farming men and women, and the other cliche of plowshares beaten into swords, at least at this time in Rome’s story, rings true.   You’ve got the first ten pages of each book here.  They are the first two in a projected series of ten books.  The third, entitled, The Terror from the North, is being written.

So stay tuned and check back often because the site’s going to expand quickly.

One more point I suppose is that I would like to help take poetry back from the long-bottomed fantasy world of academe and give it to those in need, especially in these days of violence and decay.

David Lawrence Conrad