Primal Testament is told by two voices, a muse of great authority, and an early 21st-century man humbled by her story of the inventor of life and death, the extinct and living species who are its children, and their apocalyptic edens. Ian Lancashire grew up in Winnipeg near River and lives in Toronto just west of the Humber River, fie taught English poetry at the University of Toronto from 1968 to 2012, editing Representative Poetry Online for eighteen years. In 2010 he published Forgetful Muses, a book about how poets compose.