Laurier Poetry – serie

Much-loved, cantankerous, and brilliant, Al Purdy galloped across the Canadian literary landscape for decades, grandly embodying the self-taught and hard-living image of the 1960s and '70s poet. The More Easily Kept Illusions: The Poetry of Al Purdy is a selection of thirty-five poems that includes some of his best-loved and unearths lost and ignored treasures. Robert Budde introduces the collection with an overview of Purdy's tumultuous life of letters, his legendary personality, his outrageous antics, his peers, his influences, and the history of his publishing career. Reorganizing Purdy's body of work, this collection also re-interprets the chronological and thematic development of his writing. Choosing poems for a book like this is necessarily an act of literary criticism and Budde takes care to balance the various critical attentions that have structured the historical responses to Purdy's work. The selected poems will mix lesser-known gems with Purdy's greatest hits. Teachers, poetry-lovers, students, and writers will rediscover Purdy's unique voice. Those who are new to his work will get a full and rich sense of the man some have called the last Canadian poet. Also includes an Afterword by Russell Morton Brown.

This volume features thirty-five of Don McKay's best poems, which are selected with a contextualizing introduction by Méira Cook that probes wilderness and representation in McKay, and the canny, quirky, thoughtful, and sometimes comic self-consciousness the poems adumbrate. Included is McKay's afterword written especially for this volume in which McKay reflects on his own writing process - its relationship to the earth and to metamorphosis.Don McKay has published eight books of poetry. He won the Governor General's Award in 1991 (for Night Field) and in 2000 (for Another Gravity), a National Magazine Award (1991), and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 1984 (for Birding, Or Desire). Don McKay was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize for Camber and was the Canadian winner of the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip. Born in Owen Sound, Ontario, McKay has been active as an editor, creative writing teacher, and university instructor, as well as a poet. He has taught at the University of Western Ontario, the University of New Brunswick, The Banff Centre, The Sage Hill Writing Experience, and the BC Festival of the Arts. He has served as editor and publisher of Brick Books since 1975 and from 1991 to 1996 as editor of The Fiddlehead. He resides in British Columbia.

The False Laws of Narrative is a selection of Fred Wah's poems covering the poets entire poetic trajectory to date. A founding editor of Tish magazine, Wah was influenced by leading progressive and innovative poets of the 1960s and was at the forefront of the exploration of racial hybridity, multiculturalism, and transnational family roots in poetry. The selection emphasizes his innovative poetic range. Wah is renowned as one of Canada's finest and most complex lyric poets and has been lauded for the musicality of his verse. Louis Cabri's introduction offers a paradigm for thinking about how sound is actually structured in Wah's improvisatory poetry and offers fresh insights into Wah's context and writing. In an afterword by the poet himself, Wah presents a dialogue between editor and poet on the key themes of the selected poems and reveals his abiding concerns as poet and thinker.

""On strands of light I am hanging poetry like garlands."" These first words of poetry from Nicole Brossard anticipate the vast body of work she has published in the last four decades. The poems in Mobility of Light were chosen by Louise H. Forsyth to elicit a sense of these whirling garlands and convey the intense energy - physical, creative, spiritual, erotic, imaginative, playful, ethical, and political - that has carried Brossard to a uniquely significant vision of the human spirit. Poems are presented in French and English on facing pages, underscoring the density of meaning in each word and line and highlighting the unusual rhythms in Brossard's originals and the extraordinary sonorities with which they beat. Some of the translations in this volume have been previously published, while others are new. In her afterword, Brossard talks about travelling back in time to discover how our most vivid sensations, emotions, and thoughts are nourished and transformed by our enigmatic relation to language.

Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground contains thirty-five of F.R. Scott's poems from across the five decades of his career. Scott's artistic responses to a litany of social problems, as well as his emphasis on nature and landscapes, remain remarkably relevant. Scott weighed in on many issues important to Canadians today, using different terms, perhaps, but with no less urgency than we feel now: biopolitics, neoliberalism, environmental concerns, genetic modification, freedom of speech, civil rights, human rights, and immigration. Scott is best remembered for ""The Canadian Authors Meet,"" ""W.L.M.K,"" and ""Laurentian Shield,"" but his poetic oeuvre includes significant occasional poems, elegies, found poems, and pointed satires. This selection of poems showcases the politics, the humour, and the beauty of this central modernist figure. The introduction by Laura Moss and the afterword by George Elliott Clarke provide two distinct approaches to reading Scott's work: in the contexts of Canadian modernism and of contemporary literary history, respectively.

The Toronto Star called him a legendary figure in Canadian writing, and indeed George Fetherling has been prolific in many genres: poetry, history, travel narrative, memoir, and cultural studies. Plans Deranged by Time is a representative selection from many of the twelve poetry collections he has published since the late 1960s. Like his novels and other fiction, many of these poems are anchored in a sense of place - often a very urban one. Filled with aphorism and sharp observation, the poems are spare of line and metaphor; they display a kind of elegant realism: loading docks, back doors of restaurants, doughnut shops with karate schools upstairs. In the introduction, A.F. Moritz places Fetherling in the modern picaresque tradition in the aftermath of Eliot and Pound, highlighting his characteristic speaker as an itinerant cosmopolitan outsider, a kind of flâneur, impoverished and keenly observant, writing from a position of ""communion-in-isolation."" He contrasts Fetherling's contemplative intellectualism with that of the public intellectual and highlights this outsider's fellow-feeling, making the poems indirectly political. Fetherling's afterword is an anecdote-anchored exploration of what the poet sees as his two central approaches - ""the desire to create new codes of hearing"" and ""writing-to-heal"" - and how they are reflected in the collection.

Since the beginning of his poetic career in the 1990s, derek beaulieu has created works that have challenged readers to understand in new ways the possibilities of poetry. With nine books currently to his credit, and many works appearing in chapbooks, broadsides, and magazines, beaulieu continues to push experimental poetry, both in Canada and internationally, in new directions. Please, No More Poetry is the first selected works of derek beaulieu. As the publisher of first housepress and, more recently, No Press, beaulieu has continually highlighted the possibilities for experimental work in a variety of writing communities. His own work can be classified as visual poetry, as concrete poetry, as conceptual work, and beyond. His work is not to be read in any traditional sense, as it challenges the very idea of reading; rather, it may be understood as a practice that forces readers to reconsider what they think they know. As beaulieu continues to push himself in new directions, readers will appreciate the work that he has created to date, much of which has become unavailable in Canada. With an introduction by Kit Dobson and an interview with derek beaulieu by Lori Emerson as an afterword, Please, No More Poetry offers readers an opportunity to gain access to a complex experimental poetic practice through thirty-five selected representative works.

Tom Wayman's poetry has been published around the world to great acclaim. Wayman is one of Canada's most prolific and public poets, and his writing since the 1960s has been by turns angry, engaged, hopeful, tender, and hilarious. His voice and persona are his alone but simultaneously ours too. His recurring themes - work, mortality, love, lust, friendship, the natural world - make his work a poetry of human inevitabilities, a poetry that exults in the inevitability of seeing poetry in the everyday. Wayman's craft is poïesis (from the Ancient Greek ""to make"") - making a change, making a difference, making a ruckus, making the most of our time. His working life has always been inextricable from his writing one; his poems offer an honest and candid consideration of the ideological underpinnings, practical realities, and subtle beauties of a life lived on job sites and picket lines, in union halls, classrooms, and book-stuffed offices, and on the page itself. The Order in Which We Do Things is a collection of more than thirty of Wayman's best poems, selected and introduced by Owen Percy. Percy's introduction explores the genesis of Wayman's print persona and contextualizes his politically engaged, conversational voice within the pantheon of its various publics. In his afterword, ""Work and Silence,"" Wayman reflects on his more than forty years in print as a work poet, and underlines poetry's sustained power to engage readers, invite solidarity, and stoke the fires of critical resistance to the order in which we do things.

Opening doors, dreaming awake, tracing networks of music and meaning, Marlatt's poetry stands out as an essential engagement with what matters to anyone writing with a social-environmental conscience. Rivering includes poems inspired by the village of Steveston where, before the war, a Japanese-Canadian community lived within the rhythms of salmon on the Fraser River delta. Also gathered into Rivering: lesbian love poetry from Touch to my Tongue; a transformance of Nicole Brossard's Mauve; passages from The Given, winner of the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; a traditional ""Kuri"" song from the Noh drama, The Gull; and an unpublished excerpt from the chamber opera ""Shadow Catch."" Difficult, beautiful, heart-breaking realities of the twenty-first century are urgently immediate in selections from Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now. All of the poems speak to Marlatt's poetics of place and of language as passage between distant or disparate human beings, and between human beings and the more-than-human world. The selections are framed by Susan Knutson's deeply attentive critical introduction and by Marlatt's ""immediacies of writing,"" a new lyrical essay investigating the act of writing. Closing with a walking meditation situated by her Buddhist practice, Rivering is both a ""pocket Marlatt"" and an introduction to one of the best poets of our time.

Arcing across thirty years and seven volumes, Jan Zwicky's poetry has always been acutely musical (and sensitive to the silence out of which music comes). In the compositions in Chamber Music, the first anthology of Zwicky's poems, one may perceive the attunement of her vocations: poet, philosopher, violinist. Her poetry both praises and relinquishes the earth, bearing witness to the fierce skies of the prairies and the freezing rain of the West Coast. Enacting the virtue of clarity prized and defended by her explicitly philosophical work, this poetry is both resonant and integrated. It is also formally diverse, ranging from the singular focus of the lyric ode to suites of variations and fugal structures, from polyphonic textures to the sprawling reach of narrative gestures. Throughout, one feels the deft hand of an adept using powerful metaphors to explore themes of colonial violence, environmental devastation, spiritual catastrophe, and transformation. Resisting Western philosophy's exclusion of imagination from civic life, Zwicky's poetry is noteworthy for the tension it achieves between the abstract and the personal, the general and the particular. Meditating repeatedly on themes of love and grief, this poetry is at once passionately committed to the lucidity of its utterances and the fidelity of its images.

Sonosyntactics introduces the reader to over forty-five years of Paul Dutton's diverse and inventive poetry, ranging from lyrics, prose poems, and visual work to performance texts and scores. Perhaps best known for his acclaimed solo sound performances and his contributions to the iconic sound poetry group The Four Horsemen, Dutton is a surprising, witty, sensitive, and innovative explorer of language and of the human. This volume gathers a representative selection of his most significant and characteristic poetry together with a generous selection of uncollected new work.Sonosyntactics demonstrates Dutton's willingness to (re)invent and stretch language and to listen for new possibilities while at the same time engaging with his perennial concerns - love, sex, music, time, thought, humour, the materiality of language, and poetry itself.Gary Barwin's introduction outlines the major subjects and techniques of Dutton's poetry: an intricate weaving of thought and language, sound and emotion, sound and sense, and the unfolding of a text through the logic of language play such as puns, paradoxes, ambiguity, and sound relations. In an afterword by Dutton himself, the poet insightfully lays out the terms of his engagement with the materiality - both visual and aural - of language, often beyond the purely recountable, representational, or depictive.

Nelson Ball has had a significant impact on contemporary Canadian poetry not only as a poet but as an editor, with his Weed/Flower Press in the 1960s and 70s. Certain Details provides a major overview of the breadth and many paths of Ball's poetry over six decades. This selection of his work includes his trademark minimalist poems in addition to longer works and sequences; it spans nature poems, homages, meditations, narratives, found poems, and visual poems. The book contains selections from all of Ball's major collections as well as works that have previously appeared only in chapbook or ephemeral form. In a generous and thoughtful afterword, and for the first time in print, Ball discusses his processes, influences, and aesthetics. The book is introduced by editor and poet Stuart Ross, who offers a personal entry point into Nelson Ball's extraordinary oeuvre.

I build this story like my lair. One willow, / a rib at a time"" - ""The Crooked Good""Since 1990, Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe's work has stood out as essential testimony to Indigenous experiences within the ongoing history of colonialism and the resilience of Indigenous storytellers. Sôhkêyihta includes searing poems, written across the expanse of Halfe's career, aimed at helping readers move forward from the darkness into a place of healing.Halfe's own afterword is an evocative meditation on the Cree word sôhkêyihta: Have courage. Be brave. Be strong. She writes of coming into her practice as a poet and the stories, people, and experiences that gave her courage and allowed herto construct her ""lair."" She also reflects on her relationship with nêhiyawêwin, the Cree language, and the ways in which it informs her relationships and poetics.The introduction by David Gaertner situates Halfe's writing within the history of whiteness and colonialism that works to silence and repress Indigenous voices. Gaertner pays particular attention to the ways in which Halfe addresses, incorporates, and pushes back against silence, and suggests that her work is an act of bearing witness - what Kwagiulth scholar Sarah Hunt identifies as making Indigenous lives visible.

Deportment is a selection of poems - surreal, cerebral, and defiant - by Alice Burdick. Burdick examines the dangers of dogma, women's rights, and environmental degradation in biting satires, moving elegies, and anti-sentimental lyrics filled with mischievous wordplay. The selection includes some of Burdick's most iconic poems as well as rare work from the beginning of her career in 1990s Toronto and previously unpublished material. Burdick's later poetry, more expansive in form and subject matter, addresses motherhood, the rural landscape, and sex and desire at middle age. Deportment makes the case for Alice Burdick as one of Canada's best poets, alongside figures such as Lisa Robertson, Karen Solie, and Sina Queyras.Alessandro Porco's introduction situates Burdick's early work within the Toronto small press scene, focusing on her fugitive chapbooks, broadsides, and literary ephemera while highlighting her formative relationships with Victor Coleman and Stuart Ross. He traces her move from Toronto to Nova Scotia in the early 2000s and the impact of publishing from the social and spatial margins of Canadian literature.In her afterword, Burdick reflects on everyday life - as a poet and citizen, daughter and mother -in both the zombieland of downtown Toronto and the alien geography of Eastern Canada. She explores how the comparative speed, sound, and density of urban and rural spaces have shaped her literary imagination.

Post-glacial is a collection of poems by Robert Kroetsch selected by his former student David Eso. The book features Kroetsch's iconic collection, Completed Field Notes, alongside rare work gathered from different stages of Kroetsch's career. The book contains an afterword by Aritha van Herk.Kroetsch's poetry evolved from short lyric poetry in the 1960s to postmodern long poems in the 1970s and 80s. Kroetsch's work in the 1990s and 2000s was marked by the production of experimental chapbooks. Yet it is in the 2000s that Kroetsch's celebrated The Hornbooks of Rita K and his final collection, Too Bad, were published. Post-glacial presents the material in a thematic arc that follows daily, seasonal, and biographical topics. The collection moves from moods of morning, spring, and youth to shades of darkness, winter, and mourning.In the introduction, Eso charts Kroetsch's early attempts at poetry in his teenage and undergraduate years. Eso takes the title Post-glacial from the poem ""Lonesome Writer Diptych"" and proposes the term as an alternative to ""postmodernism,"" a term often used by critics to describe Kroetsch's work. Post-glacial emphasizes the poet's interest in landscape, ecology, history, the presence of absence, and the endurance of a living past.

Current, Climate is an introduction to the environmental and social-justice poetry of Rita Wong. Selections from her poetic oeuvre show how Wong has responded to local and global inequities with outrage, linguistic inventiveness, and sometimes humour. Wong's poetry explores the meeting places of life, language, and land - from downtown Vancouver to the headwaters of the Columbia River. Her poems are deeply attentive to places and their names, and especially to the imposition of foreign words on the unceded Indigenous lands of what is otherwise known as British Columbia. Exhorting readers to recognize their responsibilities to the planet and to their communities, Wong's watershed poetics encompass anger, grief, wit, and hope.Nicholas Bradley's introduction situates Wong's poetry in its literary and cultural contexts, focusing on the role of the author in a time of crisis. In Wong's case, poetry and political activism are intertwined - and profoundly connected to the land and water that sustain us. The volume concludes with an afterword by Rita Wong.

(Re)Generation contains selected poetry by Anishinaabe writer Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm that deals with a range of issues: from violence against Indigenous women and lands to Indigenous erotica and the joyous intimate encounters between bodies. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm's influence on the field of Indigenous literature cannot be understated. Her creative work is formative, and she is responsible for the release of other influential works in the field of Indigenous literary studies through her publishing house, Kegedonce Press. Akiwenzie-Damm is proof positive that if Indigenous peoples are going to resist the violent processes of ongoing colonialism, then they're going to have to do it together.Akiwenzie-Damms's afterword speaks to the relations and obligations Indigenous peoples have to one another and their other-than-human kin, as she reflects on the resilient work that Indigenous creative work has done and continues to do in spite of colonial violence. Her afterword stakes a claim for the necessity of poetry in the face of ongoing colonialism, not only in the present but in the future and for the generations to come. The introduction by Dallas Hunt locates Akiwenzie-Damm within the field of Indigenous literature and meditates on her influence on the field of Indigenous erotica. Akiwenzie-Damm writes in service of Indigenous love, intimacy, and joy, and speaks with an unwavering voice, one that, to paraphrase Akiwenzie-Damm herself, 'shakes the earth'.

mahikan ka-onot collects the finest work of accomplished Indigenous poet Duncan Mercredi, from his first book in 1991 to recent unpublished poems. These are poems of life on the land as well as life in the city, vibrant with the rhythms of traditional Cree and Métis storytelling but also with the clamour and the music of the streets.This book brings the work of Duncan Mercredi (Cree/Métis) back into the public eye, providing a new generation of readers with the opportunity to experience his unique artistry. Mercredi brings to these poems the sensibility of a Cree speaker and a renowned oral storyteller, revealing a deep attachment to the land and a nuanced understanding of the complexities of contemporary Indigenous life. In startlingly direct, plainspoken language, the poet explores themes of cultural resurgence and steadfast connections among the generations, even amid the unfolding tragedies wrought by colonialism. Some of these poems are memories of traditional life on the land, especially in the time before Manitoba Hydro radically altered Mercredi's home community of Grand Rapids, Manitoba. Others focus on the urban Indigenous experience, based upon Mercredi's longstanding and intimate knowledge of Winnipeg. Like mahikan, the wolf, Mercredi's characters are often outsiders in certain contexts, but the poems reveal other perspectives that allow us to understand their loyalty and their love of community. The volume includes an afterword by Duncan Mercredi and an introduction by Métis scholar Warren Cariou, both of which provide resources for deeper study of the poems.

Lillian Allen is one of the leading creative Black feminist voices in Canada. Her work has been foundational to the dub poetry movement, which swept across the Black diaspora in the 1980s, taking roots/routes in Kingston, Toronto, and London and offering exciting sounds of protest and a careful, detailed documenting of everyday life as political praxis. Make the World New brings together some of the highlights of Lillian Allen's work in a single volume, the first book of her poems to be published in over twenty years. It revisits her well-known verse from the celebrated collections Rhythm an' Hardtimes, Women Do This Everyday, and Psychic Unrest, while also assembling new and uncollected poems. Allen's poetry is both political and creative in its attempts to make the world new and in its incisive narration of black life. Her work is intersectional in the most radical ways and highlights the need for gendered, racial, and political change as a process of social transformation. In the current historical movement for Black Lives, protests for racial justice and calls for institutional change, these poems echo with meaningful resonance while also reminding us of the long struggles for change. Allen's afterword includes the writer's reflections on her process and poetics and the social and cultural impact of the work.

DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono engages actively with a diasporic world: Otiono is equally at home critiqueing petroculture in Nigeria and in Canada. His work straddles multiple poetic traditions and places African intellectual history at the forefront of an engagement with western poetics. The poems in this selection are drawn from Otiono's two pulished collections, Voices in the Rainbow, and Love in a Time of Nightmares, and includes previously unpublished new poems. Peter Midgley’s introduction contextualizes Otiono's work within the frame of diaspora and newer critical frames like Afropolitanism, attending to form as well as his political engagement. The volume concludes with an afterword written by the poet with Chris Dunton.

With compassion, humour and sharp-eyed irreverence, Ronna Bloom's work has made a significant impact on Canadian poetry. A Possible Trust is selected from her work to date.Bloom writes concisely of the precarious, the ephemeral, the epic, and of the fragility and determination of people in daily life and extraordinary health crises. Throughout her six collections, she is attentive to suffering, as well as to spontaneous connections and gestures of love.Her poetry has been used by teachers, architects, spiritual leaders, and in hospitals across Canada. This is poetry engaged with spontaneity, presence, work, and health care. There is a tenderness here where living matters, as does dying, a valuing of the incident, the encounter, the unexpected, the sorrow and the bowl-me-over delight.Bloom speaks to us about how vulnerability, suffering, and the release into joy, can combine as an ongoing, never-ending life practice. She mines her own experience while looking out into the world with awareness, empathy and the willingness to risk being wide open. These poems stand firm with readers.Editor and poet Phil Hall's Introduction "To Lead by Crying" argues for a poetics of empathy, and is an enthusiastic retrospective of Bloom's work. In the Afterword, Ronna Bloom traces the relevance of photography, psychotherapy, and meditation in her work. Defiant, comical, revealing, impolite yet respectful, A Possible Trust is a retrospective and celebration.

To describe the writing of Marilyn Dumont is to call her a poet of reclamation and resurgence. Some thirty-five years ago she set about documenting her life as a young Métis woman and telling the story of her people, the Red River Métis, and, in the process, she has become a principal literary voice for the “Renaissance” of the Métis nation. To understand Marilyn Dumont’s work is to understand Métis culture and history, that of a people who originated in the 17thth century upon the meeting of the First Nations and the newcomers, the European voyageurs and cartographers who travelled along the great waterways of Turtle Island/ North America.How does a Métis poet write about a country where its politicians and bureaucrats are honoured as national figures when they made family fortunes from confiscated Métis and First Nations lands? For Dumont, the answer to this question resides in telling the truth, about the present and the past. Through carefully crafted poems, Dumont takes the reader through a range of personal and historically connected experiences grounded in emotional truth. For Dumont, perception, like memory, is as much about the body as it is the mind, surfacing as visionary insight, which has become the hallmark of her poetry.Reclamation and Resurgence contains poems selected from A Really Good Brown Girl, green girl dreams Mountains, from that tongued belonging, and The Pemmican Eaters, as well as previously uncollected poems, and includes an introduction by Armand Garnet Ruffo and an afterword, "Contradictory Co-existence," by Marilyn Dumont.