As a painter turned poet in mid life, Eldon Grier demonstrates strong visual elements of both imagism and surrealism in his poetry. His work has also been influenced, in its sophistication and humanity, by his extensive travels. He is a poet who is well regarded by critics but has not achieved wide popularity.

Grier was born in 1917, in London, England, to Canadian parents, Charles Brockwill Grier (a captain in the Canadian army) and Kathleen Phyllis Black Grier. The family returned to Montreal in 1918, where his father became a stockbroker, and Grier grew up, in his words, in "a rather isolated ghetto of wealth" and was educated at private schools in Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto. He left home to become a painter at the age of seventeen and struggled to make a living in the bohemian art world of the 1930s and 1940s, studying with Goodridge Roberts and John...