Glickman argues that early immigrants to Canada brought with them the expectation that nature would be grand, mysterious, awesome - even terrifying - and welcomed scenes that conformed to these notions of sublimity. She contends that to interpret their descriptions of nature as "negative," as so many critics have done, is a significant misunderstanding. Glickman provides close readings of several important works, including Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm," Charles G.D. Roberts's Ave, and Paulette Jiles's "Song to the Rising Sun," and explores the poems in the context of theories of nature and art. Instead of projecting backward from a modernist perspective, Glickman reads forward from the discovery of landscape as a legitimate artistic subject in seventeenth-century England and argues that picturesque modes of description, and a sublime aesthetic, have governed much of the representation of nature in this country.

Running in Prospect Cemetery includes the best work from Susan Glickman's four previous volumes, as well as a large selection of superb new poems that continue to demonstrate her versatility, confidence, compassion and humour. Glickman has been a Signal poet since the publication of Complicity in 1983, a collection that prompted The Journal of Commonwealth Literature to hail her as "one of the finest of the new generation of Canadian writers," a promise she has brilliantly fulfilled in an extraordinary twenty-year career that has always stayed true to the poetry that, as she puts it in the title poem--is "wholly accepting of what I am / this small frame of muscle and bone." Susan Glickman was raised in Montreal and now makes her home in Toronto, where she teaches at the Lycée Français de Toronto. She is the author of four collections of poetry, and has won both the Gabrielle Roy Prize and the Raymond Klibansky Prize for her work of literary criticism The Picturesque & the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape. She is currently working on her second novel.