The World You Now Own is P.W. Bridgman’s fifth book. It is a hybrid volume which combines poems published since the release of his most recent collection, Idiolect, with a novella written entirely in verse. The title of the latter is “Deliverance 1961: A Novella in Thirty-Two Cantos”, a flashback-driven account of a chance meeting between two troubled characters on a train.

Commonalities can be discerned between the content of this new title and what is revealed in Bridgman’s earlier poetry collections. Perhaps the most obvious is the fact that Bridgman continues to favour the narrative poetic form. Tensions in the darker (sometimes political) pieces are relieved by the tenderness of the love poems and the gentle humour in those which take aim at the self-important and cantankerous types who move among us. Acclaimed poet, novelist and translator George McWhirter has described Bridgman as “an open, free-agent versifier.” The tendency to embrace unconventionality in form and content that prompted that observation is, again, plainly evident in The World You Now Own.
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“The world P. W. Bridgman evokes in The World You Now Own is rich and multifaceted, peopled with closely drawn characters of various ages situate in many locations and walks of life. There is sly humour here, along with fine, detailed observations and sumptuous turns of phrase: in tenderness (for a child, for the world in its beauties and its tragedies) and in moving love poems. Bridgman engages in technical feats throughout, with his formal invention particularly evident in the novella in verse that rocks along like its passenger train setting, where two characters confront their pasts and (potential) futures.”
— Frances Boyle, author of Openwork and Limestone and Seeking Shade
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Excerpts from reviews of P.W. Bridgman’s earlier works:

“His poetic forms, structures and composition are hugely varied and rich. He has a fondness for the long line in the vein of Ciaran Carson and some of his more conversational poems remind me slightly of Rita Ann Higgins.”
—Peter Clarke, reviewing Idiolect in Ink, Sweat & Tears

“A wonderful, essential book that sings to our sorrows, cloaks our mysteries, celebrates the fierceness of our young love and the joy of appreciative love that survives and grows later in life.”
—John Swanson, reviewing A Lamb in the Pacific Rim Review of Books

“[A] strong new voice in Canadian Literature.”
—Tara Gilboy, reviewing Standing at an Angle to My Age in PRISM International