Dennis Lee – författare

A landmark collection from one of Canada’s literary icons, and the founder of House of Anansi Press, Heart Residence collects for the first time work from all corners of Dennis Lee’s extraordinary career.This book is an exhilarating revelation. No other poet in Canada has the depth and range of Dennis Lee — jazzman, jester, and metaphysician, hardball political thinker and passionate lover, he has been publishing poems for fifty years. His first book, Kingdom of Absence, published in 1967, was the founding publication of House of Anansi Press. Since then Lee has produced work across the poetic spectrum, from nursery rhymes and skipping songs to uncompromising moral introspection to full-tilt love songs, plangent psalms, and ecstatic, solitary prayer.There are poets’ poets and people’s poets. And then there are those few who are neither and both: the few who become, over time, part of the warp and weft of their culture. Heart Residence collects, for the first time, work from all corners of this extraordinary career. In its verve and variety, this is a one-of-a-kind collection.

Testament is the summation of Dennis Lee’s decade-long exploration of the dilemma of contemporary existence. Incorporating and rethinking the work published in Un and Yesno, and featuring many completely new poems, this startling collection reminds us anew of the catastrophic reality we have made of our planet, while simultaneously insisting on a particular kind of hope for our future. Testament continues Lee’s radical and inventive use of language, shaping the familiar into the shockingly new. It is a landmark achievement, and a fitting end to one of the most ambitious projects in Canadian poetry.