Brent MacLaine's poems are rooted in the history and landscape of his native Prince Edward Island. At the same time, his is a poetry without roots; MacLaine belongs to the first generation that is not farming the land. He has a remarkable ability to graft a rural past to a keen sense of contemporary culture, its urban habits and its popular entertainments, its scientific theories and its technological mythologies.

These Fields Were Rivers presents an astonishing range in mood and idea, the poems shaped by the poet's nimble attention to his quotidian world.