Summer's Idyll

Long, dramatic narrative poems like Riel, Coppermine and Tecumseh were all pieces of a grand public mythology. A True History of Lambton County was more private, more personal, as were the family poems recently published in Love in the Wintertime. Summer's Idyll, a novel, is a new departure for Don Gutteridge, but it belongs to the same overall scheme. It tells the story of a summer in the life of a young boy, now a man in his middle years. A people coming of age, a boy coming of age, the past giving birth, as it must, to the present.