Was the word, and the word was with “The God of Paths,” and the poem was from Matthew Francis’s second poetry collection, Dragons (Faber & Faber 2001), the impetus for my getting into publishing in the first place.

¶ I remember the moment distinctly. I had returned from a year of postgraduate studies in London, feeling very nostalgic about what I’d left behind, only to find myself in one of Toronto’s first Indigo bookstores, vaguely circling the too-gleaming white, stark, open spaces in abject bewilderment as to what I was doing there. What exactly was I looking for?

¶ Then I saw it, a slim volume with the unmistakably English-sounding name of a poet I hadn’t heard of before — Matthew Francis — that swiftly fell to “The God of Paths” and provided a right jolt in metaphor. It was all wit and wonder and glorious idiom, and how the hell could any sane brain manage to do all that in a single poem? A single, solitary p-o-e-m!

¶ I decided “The God of Paths” would do most fittingly as a preface for a collection of black and white photographs I was compiling from my year in the UK, including an epiphanic solo four-day trek I’d made along the Pembrokeshire Coast Path in Wales less than a year before. I contacted Faber & Faber to request permission. As I awaited a reply, I discovered a series of brief poems on Matthew Francis’s website that didn’t seem to be available anywhere else. So I contacted him, too, and asked if they were to be published. No? Well, then, would you let me?

¶ I was stupefied he said yes, whereupon Rufus Books was hastily registered as a business to make it happen. Which it did in 2005, and for which Matthew Francis even crossed the Atlantic with his lovely wife Creina to help launch Whereabouts in and about Toronto with visits to the CN Tower (of course), U of T, Art Bar, gritLit in Hamilton, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and Niagara Falls. A right jolt, indeed!