“Now, the poems drawn from Knister’s farm experiences still have the power to surprise me.....These are images from the Essex County world he loved so much, and they suggest that although he did not take professionally to farming, he did see himself as a poet-farmer with his poems as apples or blades of grass whose orchard and barn he kept handy in the spaceless world of the imagination.”


From Preface, by James Reaney, in Windfalls for Cider...The Poems of Raymond Knister. (Windsor: Black Moss Press, 1983, page 7)

 

Faded black and white photograph of the Hiram Walker Farm tobacco fields; there are several workers in the field; the crops on the far left and the back of the photograph are tall and the crops in the centre and to the right of the photograph have been cut; there are two farm buildings to the far right of the photo and additional buildings at the top and left of the photo in the background.

Tobacco field at Hiram Walker Farm, ca. 1894.

Tobacco knife, 1962.

Ploughman's Song

Turn under, plow,

My trouble;

Turn under griefs

And stubble.

 

Turn mouse's nest,

Gnawing years;

Old roots up

For new love's tears.

 

Turn, plow, the clods

For new thunder.

Turn under, plow,

Turn under.

 

29 April 1925.

Northwood, Ontario

(After Exile, page 124)