Though Maritime poet Alden Nowlan’s works are often praised for their simplicity, the man behind them was anything but simple. Born in poverty and raised in obscurity, Nowlan was so different from his small-town Nova Scotia neighbours that he was considered developmentally delayed, and was institutionalized for a time in his early teens. He later reinvented himself, first as a journalist in New Brunswick and later as one of its best-loved poets. With If I Could Turn and Meet Myself, Patrick Toner, an instructor at the University of New Brunswick, attempts to bring the often-elusive writer into plain view.

Toner’s is not an easy task; Nowlan presented himself, in his writing and in his life, as a mythologized figure with an ever-changing past. He embroidered new truths and hid old ones, even from those closest to him. (He told his wife, for instance, that his mother was dead; in fact, she outlived Nowlan.) In this meticulously indexed and footnoted volume, Toner uses Nowlan’s letters and papers, exhaustive interviews with friends and family – some of whom have never before spoken on the record about the poet – and Nowlan’s own published poetry, fiction, and journalism to infuse the writer, dead since 1983, with life again.

Toner often seems to rely too heavily on Nowlan’s published work, imbuing it with perhaps more autobiographical content than the author intended – his efforts are particularly unsatisfying in linking Stephanie, a character in Nowlan’s novel Various Persons Named Kevin O’Brien, with both Nowlan’s estranged sister Harriet and his cousin Sylvia. By and large, however, the book is successful. It is the first book-length look at Nowlan’s life, and as such it anchors Nowlan in the canon, buffeted by the writers who influenced him and the poets he subsequently mentored.

And though Toner’s affection for Nowlan is evident, the biographer also offers an unflinching look at his subject’s less lovable side. Drink, in which Nowlan indulged more and more toward the end of his life, made him querulous, and friends who had previously enjoyed the full sunshine of the writer’s affection could suddenly find themselves out in the cold for transgressions real or imagined. In the end, Toner offers a fuller portrait of Nowlan than the man himself ever did.