In Dennis Cooley's words: "The Bentleys" also relates to Bloody Jack in as much as both titles are long poems, and both are responses to life as it has been imagined on the prairies. In "The Bentleys", I 'revisit' an earlier time, the Dirty Thirties, yet the text I have constructed is in most respects recent to our time in its style and strategies. The manuscript is not constrained all that much by Ross's text, even as it is happily and provocatively enabled by it. The connections, then, are loose, so much so that many parts of the "Bentleys" would probably be unrecognisable to readers of Ross's classic novel. I might mention that in assembling "The Bentleys", I was in part guided by a sense of the theatre. I've tried to run a performance metaphor through the manuscript and have, since I submitted it to Alberta, written 3 or 4 more poems along that line. I mention this not with the material. I started working on the manuscript in 1989, drawn to the situation: the Puritanism that constrains the characters, and that set against their fierce passions. I've always been struck about that in Canadian life and here was a gift: a frustrated musician, an aspiring painter - and the two of them thwarted by the economic devastation of the Dirty Thirties and the claims of Puritanism. In a way, it's everybody's story - the force of desire and wish, the containment of their world.