B.Ed.

Degree
Biography

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, born in Arezzo, Italy, in 1949, grew up in Montreal, Toronto, and Baltimore, and then moved to Toronto in 1967, where he studied as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto until the early 1970s. In his first career, as poet and literary editor, he paused after his eleventh collection of poems, Virgin Science (1986). Two years earlier he had taken vows as a brother in the Order of St. Augustine at the Marylake monastery north of Toronto. His second vocation, as a Roman Catholic priest, followed his Master of Divinity degree in 1990. In 1993 he was ordained as Father George and has served in various parishes in the Archdiocese of Toronto. During this time he rekindled his public life as a poet. A lover of women when young, and of God especially today, Di Cicco reminds one of John Donne, but unlike that gloomy Anglican bishop of London, he is a most gentle, cheerful, and big-hearted priest, and his poems are heart-breakingly compassionate of ordinary people and their lives. These poems are also, as Dennis Lee says, heroic. His books of poetry include

  • Di Cicco, Pier Giorgio. We Are the Light Turning. Toronto: Missing Link Press, 1975.
  • --. We Are the Light Turning. (revised ed.) Birmingham, Ab.: Tunder City Press, 1976.
  • --. The Sad Facts. Fredericton: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1977.
  • --. The Circular Dark. Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1977.
  • --. Dancing in a House of Cards. Toronto: Three Trees Press, 1978.
  • --. A Burning Patience. Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1978.
  • --. Dolce-Amaro. Alabama: Papavero Press, 1979, (limited edition).
  • --. The Tough Romance. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979. Reprinted in Montreal: Guernica Editions, 1990.
  • --. A Straw Hat for Everything. Birmingham, Ab.: Angelstone Press, 1981.
  • --. Flying Deeper Into the Century. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982
  • --. Dark to Light: Reasons for Humanness. Vancouver: Intermedia, 1983.
  • --. Women We Never See Again. Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1984
  • --. Post-Sixties Nocturne. Fredericton: Goose Lane, 1985.
  • --. Virgin Science. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986
  • --. Les Amours difficiles. Trans. Frank Caucci. Montreal: Guernica Editions, 1990. (The Tough Romance in French )
  • --. Living in Paradise: New and Selected Poems. Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2001.
  • --. The Honeymoon Wilderness. Toronto: The Mansfield Press, 2002.