Douglas Lochhead left Massey College in 1975 to become Edgar and Dorothy Davidson Chair of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. He told an interviewer later that he spent his first two years teaching and finding a centre for the program. He also extended its curriculum and, as always, continued writing poetry inspired by the unique geography around Sackville. The town occupies uplands overlooking a broad expanse of tidal, saltwater marsh that has long inspired poets such as Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman. Lochhead first saw the Tantramar Marshes from a troop train on his way to England during the Second World War. After moving to Sackville, he visited them nearly every day where he watched the many flocks of migrating birds and closely observed the landscape that became an important subject for his poems.