About the Author

Timothy Shay writes and lives in Vancouver, BC. His work has appeared in many Canadian literary magazines, on CBC Radio and in the ROLLING STONE. He has one book, THIS CABIN AS THE SS TITANIC, and several chapbooks, and his collection THE DIRTY KNEES OF PRAYER is forthcoming from Caitlin Press in 2016.

Reviews

"I first read Tim Shay's poetry in 1973 in Nelson when we were impossibly young. But even then I knew there was a mammoth talent in his voice. It was so clear. At first, Tim's poetry reminded me of Al Purdy, Milton Acorn and Allen Ginsberg, but over time there was a wonderful seam of the metaphysical and whimsical in Tim's gaze that drew in other voices like Eliot, Cohen and Blake. Tim is the real thing. He is such a good 'makar.' The fact that he is not a household name is simply part of the same crazy cultural affliction that besets the jazz community in North America. But as in jazz, other players know how good Tim Shay is, and that's what's important. The Dirty Knees of Prayer is a great baroque feast of beautiful poetry. We're lucky to have it." -- John Lent

"Revelation--like the crow that appears so often in this wonderful collection--wears a dark uniform. There is much here, much. That is most of what can be said, aside from an appreciation that these singular pieces are crafted, cast and crystallized by many days, nights, lifetimes of ... the oily coffee/tastes like old lead pencil shavings." -- Dennis Bolen

"The collection is accessible, and grapples with important, interesting issues universal to to human experience. The poems are varied and monologic in nature, so the reader is exposed to an ambitious breadth of themes and speakers. I believe this will be appreciated and enjoyed by a great many readers." -- Eliot Gilbert, Existere

"The journey I travelled while winding through the pages of this book was one well worth taking and some of the passages will remain indelibly etched in my memory." -- Candace James, Canadian Poetry Review

"Tim Shay's poems in The Dirty Knees of Prayer unflinchingly reveal lives illuminated by a bleak light: he is not afraid to portray 'the corners where dark night / stores its darker hollows.' Yet the tough vision of dysfunction the poems offer--'a family where everyone broken / reached out to everyone broken'--is redeemed by a sparkling precision of observation and a confident deployment of language. Shay can capture a landscape during a specific moment in late autumn as accurately as any camera: 'Snow did not give / yellow leaves the time to depart.' The indifference of nature, or the divine, to human failings or suffering is encapsulated with reference to 'the Earless Infinite.' An elegy for a miner father, stoic in the face of a fatal occupational disease ('always silence leading to silence'), ends with a powerful haiku-like image: 'No one returns to the empty chair. / The shadow there appears to give speeches.' Indeed, all Shay's poems in The Dirty Knees of Prayer give eloquent voice to darkness, while the poet's command of craft lets us listen absorbedly to the wisdom and insight his poems have to convey." -- Tom Wayman