While throughout his life he has been a committed and passionate reader of poetry, P.W. Bridgman is, by admission, an outlier and an unruly (if not ungovernable) latecomer to the writing of poems. In the words of Vancouver’s former poet laureate, George McWhirter, he is an “open, free-agent versifier”. Less bounded than most by convention, Bridgman writes poems which have drawn favorable comment and praise for their boldness and originality, both as to form and content.
P.W. Bridgman was first a writer of short fiction and this fact is reflected in his leaning toward narrative poetry—a leaning that is again evident in the work that comprises Idiolect. These new poems aim to explore love, loss, happiness, sorrow and redemption. They seek to provide glimpses of both our better and lesser selves, often in circumstances where character and belief are tested by life events. As critic and fellow poet John Swanson observed when reviewing Bridgman’s first book of poems (A Lamb, published in 2018), Bridgman’s poetry “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.”

If Idiolect, as the dictionary suggests, is about individual speech habits, P.W. Bridgman is to be congratulated for his amazing range of diction, from colloquial idioms to elevated speech and delightful rhetorical hijinks. […] His new book offers surprise after surprise, with perhaps the fattest sonnets ever written, some lines pushing thirty syllables, but whipped into shape by wickedly clever end-rhymes.
~ Gary Geddes, author of What Does A House Want?

Idiolect is a lively, marvellous collection of lyrics, vignettes and short, fleet-footed narratives teeming with history and language. […] A generous, capacious collection touched throughout with technical skill and compassion.
~ Stephen Sexton, 2020 winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection

P.W. Bridgman writes from Vancouver, Canada. He has previously published two books of short fiction—a selection of short stories entitled Standing at an Angle to My Age (Libros Libertad) in 2013, and a selection of short stories and flash fiction entitled The Four-Faced Liar (Ekstasis Editions) in 2021. His first collection of poems, entitled A Lamb, appeared under the Ekstasis Editions imprint in 2018.

Learn more about P.W. Bridgman by visiting his website at <www.pwbridgman.ca>