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“...a tender, spare, unrelenting sense of things.” — Charles Meanwell
“Terpstra is meditative and deliberately meandering. Even his short poems aspire to be longer, for he wanders around the contours of a theme, an idea or memory, eyeballing the places where the gold is buried, then unearthing it.” — George Elliott Clarke
“John Terpstra is a wonderful (lyrical) storyteller, who voices Mystery and the ordinary alike as verbal music. It’s the ‘same old story’ that he tells so piercingly — the ancient drama of ‘impersihable life’ assailed within and without — and it’s also brand new, refreshing, minted in the here and now.” — Stan Dragland
“John Terpstra’s meditations have the soundness and snug fit of consummate carpentry, measure in language and in thought showing ‘the ultimate patience involved / in all things made.’ His writing is religious writing from the ground up, negotiating the difficult moral terrain between wildness and ‘development’ with an imaginative grasp reminiscent of Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies. His are important books, with the toughness of maple, and the compassion of cedar.” — Don McKay
“John Terpstra knows how to ‘uncover earth / beneath the asphalt’: his writing chats you into time warps in the middle of the shopping mall and plunges you over the precipices of geography and psyche. His poems and his prose dissolve the boundaries between the dream and the tangibly real, between the transcendent and the quotidian, and they have the effect, like all fine writing, of making you look back sharply at the unnoticed aliveness of the everyday.” — Deborah Bowen
“His writing is textured with the pull between temporal and eternal, the drag and delight of the body, the light and dark of the soul. He writes against the all too human tendency to fall into oneself, to nurture hardnesses of spirit [...]” — Marnie Parsons
“...ridiculously moving.” — Frances Cockburn
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