Zailig Pollock – författare

The Second Scroll, the only novel by poet A.M. Klein, is an ambitious and complex work that interlaces prose, poetry, drama, and commentary. The narrative follows a Canadian Jew to the newly established state of Israel on a double mission - to collect the emerging national literature and to search for his Uncle Melech Davidson, a Holocaust survivor. Klein creates a modern Torah out of the uncle's crises of faith as he attempts to come to terms with the atrocities of the Second World War. The five chapters of The Second Scroll mirror the books of the Pentateuch (the 'first scroll') and the language is rich with biblical, talmudic, kabbalistic, and literary allusions as both the narrator and his uncle wrestle with the meaning of Jewish identity, messianic faith, and homecoming.Popham and Pollock's scholarly edition re-creates the feel of the Knopf publication of 1951-now a collector's item-but restores the text to Klein's original vision. This includes echoing the architectural structure of the Sistine Chapel in the physical layout of 'Gloss Gimel,' Klein's powerful commentary on Michelangelo's famous ceiling. Extensive annotations, and appendices that cross-reference the finished book to the raw material gathered during the author's trip to Israel and to the fund-raising speeches he delivered on his return, give the reader access to the process by which the novel took shape. A significant addition to UTP's Collected Works of A.M. Klein, and of interest not only to Klein scholars, The Second Scroll marks the inception of Holocaust literature and holds a central place in the Canadian literary canon.

It is for his poetry that A.M. Klein is best known and most warmly remembered. This collection includes all Klein's poetry, both original works and translations from Hebrew, Yiddish, Aramaic, and Latin. Many of them, coming from all periods of his careers, have never been published.The poems are arranged chronologically according to date of composition. This makes possible, for the first time, an appreciation of Klein's poetic development. The editor's introduction places this development in the perspective of Klein's life and time, and in particular explores Klein's lifelong struggle to reconcile his dual vocations as both a Jewish and a modernist writer.The textual apparatus identifies all authoritative versions for each poem and lists all emendations and all substative variants in both published and mauscript versions. The explanatory notes gloss obscure terms and references. They also provide a rich context for appreciation and interpretation by drawing connections with Klein's life, his wide reading, and his work as a whole. Wherever possible, Klein's own numerous, but scattered, comments on his poems have been cited.

Throughout his career A.M. Klein was concerned primarily with his relationship to his community, seeing himself, and all serious artists, as necessarily shaping and being shaped by the community in which they are rooted. Yet Klein's vision of this relationship was profoundly ambivalent, and this ambivalence is reflected most clearly in his troubled attitude to the two dominant strains in his work, Jewishness and modernism.In this study of A.M. Klein's work, Zailig Pollock focuses on 'the story of the poet,' which Klein retells again and again at major turning points in his career. Pollock argues that the story reflects Klein's attempt to mediate between his dual Jewish and modernist ambitions. While Klein's Jewishness gave him a sense of rootedness and vocation, it placed constraints on his personal and artistic freedom. Modernism offered Klein freedom for personal exploration and artistic expression, but the rootlessness implicit in modernism repelled him.The story of the poet who engages in a strategic inner retreat from a hostile or, at best, indifferent society, eventually returning as a redeemer of the society which spurned him, was first formulated in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens.' It was most fully articulated in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' and The Second Scroll, and abandoned only in the despairing works which immediately preceded Klein's final breakdown and silence.This is the first book to survey all of Klein's poetry, prose, and journalism, published and unpublished, and place it in the context of its times.

Throughout his career A.M. Klein struggled to define for himself the role of the poet in the contemporary world. Deeply rooted in the traditions of Judaism, and at the same time powerfully attracted by the freedom and scope of international modernism, he sought to reconcile past and present, community and creative individuality. Whether or not he finally achieved his own high aims, it was, in his own words, 'something merely to entertain them.' The result was a body of work immensely rich and varied in tone, language, cultural resonance.This collection of eighty-four poems offers a representative sampling of Klein's finest poetry, while taking into account the changing critical discourse of the last fifty years. Anyone interested in experiencing the full range of Klein's poetic achievement, or in understanding the complex nature of the poet, need look no further than this eminently readable volume.

This volume of E.J. Pratt's selected poems introduces Pratt's poems to the college and university student, to provide the kind of information needed for an informed reading of the poems. The volume offers a full sampling of Pratt's poems chosen on the joint basis of representativeness and intrinsic value. This includes the major long poems, The Witches' Brew, The Iron Door, The Titanic, Brébeuf and His Brethren, Towards the Last Spike, and important shorter lyrics including 'Newfoundland,' 'Come Away, Death,' and 'From Stone to Steel.'The editorial approach has been historical, chronological and biographical. The introduction locates Pratt in his Newfoundland and Canadian contexts and discusses the development of his work in terms of his early modernist contemporaries, concluding that E.J. Pratt remains the most important and influential Canadian poet up to the mid-fifties. As such, he has been an key figure in shaping the Canadian literary imagination of his day and the later poetics of landscape adopted by Earle Birney and Margaret Atwood.The reader is provided with annotations, textual notes, a biographical chronology, and an introduction which locates Pratt in his Newfoundland and Canadian contexts and discusses the development of his work in terms of his modernist contemporaries. The printed volumes is supplemented by the electronic resources of the Selected Pratt website at http://www.trentu.ca/pratt/selected.

P.K. Page is best known as one of Canada's finest poets, but over the course of her career she has also written a number of essays – meditations – on her life and work, on the nature of art and the imagination, and on Canadian works of literature, painting, and film that have had special significance for her. As lovers of her poetry would hope and expect, these essays are beautiful, intelligent, moving, and delightfully quirky. The Filled Pen brings together the most important of these essays, including two previously unpublished: A Writer's Life and Fairy Tales, Folk Tales: The Language of the Imagination.. Zailig Pollock, Page scholar and professor of English at Trent University, has edited and annotated this collection for admirers of Page's work, general readers, and academics alike.The essays, which cover a period of approximately forty years, reflect Page's enduring concerns as a verbal and visual artist with the power of art and the imagination to transcend the barriers that limit our perceptions of the world and our sympathies with our fellow human beings. Page is more interested in posing questions than imposing answers; and fascinated as she is by a wide range of ideas, from ancient mysticism to modern neurophysiology, it is images, endlessly evocative and suggestive, that matter to her most. Her comments on A.M. Klein from "A Sense of Angels", one of the most moving and perceptive tributes by one poet to another, apply very much to the P.K. Page we see in The Filled Pen: "For all his interest in the immediate world ... for all his acceptance of ideological and psychological theory, he seemed to reach beyond both to a larger reality."

Much of A.M. Klein's finest prose is to be found in the mass of uncompleted work that he abandoned at the time of his breakdown, and that became accessible only when his papers were deposited in the National Archives. Notebooks offers a generous selection of this work, revealing previously unsuspected facets of Klein's character and artistry.The fiction, criticism, and memoirs collected here focus on Klein's exploration of the role of the artist. The works illuminate crucial periods of his career, especially the early 1940s, when he was transforming himself into a modernist, and the early 1950s, when he was struggling to overcome the misgivings about his art that were to lead to his final breakdown.The semi-autobiographical text which Klein referred to as 'Raw Material' and the unfinished novel of prison life entitled 'Stranger and Afraid' cast a new light on Klein's often frustrating relationship with the Montreal Jewish community. In 'Marginalia' he discusses poetic form and technique and makes observations on the nature of poetry, thereby providing insights into his own concerns as a writer. In 'The Golem,' a profoundly ambiguous treatment of the act of creation, a self-portrait emerges of a storyteller who has lost faith in the power and value of his story. The volume includes a critical introduction, that places the material in the context of Klein's other works, as well as textual and explanatory notes.