Peter Midgley

“Peter allowed a good working relationship to grow, and I must admit that this is something that few non-Inuit men have done with my work. He demonstrated respect for my words, and a curiosity and a hunger for understanding Inuit peoples. ... It was his openness to other world views and his recognition that our worlds are not separate that I appreciated most.”

“Reading poetry and studying the form is one thing; writing poetry is a different matter all together. Not only did Peter Midgley give me valuable tips to make my manuscript sing by pointing out the false notes, but also and perhaps more importantly, he has the knack to reveal the strength of the piece in both content and structure that may be working below the writer’s conscious level. To learn that allows a writer to grow. To me, those are the true virtues of an editor, especially, a poetry editor.”

“Peter really helped me understand the journey I was asking my readers to take with me in this collection. He asked me to be consistent yes, but that consistency was about my own thought processes of why I’d made the decisions I’d made. It was an honour to have Peter work as an editor on my new collection.”

“As the process lengthened and came close to finishing, my lens widened and I could feel and appreciate your tremendous grasp of this book’s shape, its meaning, its architecture, and its voice. Your insistence that the notes be substantive was exactly right. The way you championed “To float...” from the beginning was extraordinary. Much of your initial work is evidenced in Denise Ahlefeldt’s inspired design.”

“Peter’s copy-edits are excellent . . . many of his comments in the manuscript were questions my argument raised for him . . . perceptive in ways that I’ve never encountered from a copy-editor.”