Carcanet Press - Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology

Description
Excerpt
Editors
Contents
Reviews

Including poetry by:

A.M. Klein
Anne Wilkinson
Irving Layton
George Johnston
Margaret Avison
David Wevill
Eric Ormsby
Norm Sibum
Marius Kociejowski
Anne Carson
Dionne Brand
George Elliott Clarke
Steven Heighton

Cosmopolitan, hybrid and eloquent, modern Canadian poetry is still, for many readers outside Canada, one of the great undiscovered terrains of world literature. Modern Canadian Poets sets out to end that neglect, redefining the connections between Canada and the international poetry world. From poets born in the early years of the twentieth century to those writing in the twenty-first, Modern Canadian Poets explores a lineage of modernist, multilingual, culturally pluralist writers who have engaged with other English- and French-speaking traditions in new ways, to make a literature that is unmistakably Canadian and international.

The thirty-five poets included represent a wide spectrum of Canadian poetry of the last hundred years in its variety of styles and traditions. Among them are French Canadian poets in translations by anglophone writers, and poets from the First Nations, Caribbean-Canadian and Africadian communities.

From their vantage point as Canadian poets living outside Canada, Evan Jones and Todd Swift draw a new map of this unique literary landscape.

Introduction

W.W.E. ROSS (1894–1966)
The Diver
The Old Song
Moonlight
By the River
The Vessel
The City

ALFRED BAILEY (1905–1997)
The Unreturning
The Isosceles Lighthouse
The Question, Is It?
Border River
Miramichi Lightning
The Bumpkin and the Bobcat

A.M. KLEIN (1909–1972)
The Rocking Chair
Portrait of the Poet as Landscape
Montreal
Lone Bather
Heirloom

JOHN GLASSCO (1909–1981)
Quebec Farmhouse
Brummell at Calais
The Game
[Autrefois]
[A propos de cet enfant]
ANNE WILKINSON (1910–1961)
Lullaby
Lens
Little Men Slip into Death
Nature Be Damned
A Cautionary Tale
TV Hockey

IRVING LAYTON (1912–2006)
Berry Picking
Keine Lazarovitch 1870-1959
Marché Municipale

GEORGE JOHNSTON (1913–2004)
Firefly Evening
The Pool
War on the Periphery
The Bargain Sale
Spring Moon
October

DOUGLAS LEPAN (1914–1998)
Nimbus
The Wounded Prince
Coureurs de Bois
Canoe-Trip

ANNE HÉBERT (1916–2000)
The Closed Room
Mystery of the Verb
Snow
Too Tightly Fitted
Captive Gods

P.K. PAGE (1916–2010)
Cry Ararat!
Planet Earth
After Rain
Arras
Man with One Small Hand

JOAN MURRAY (1917–1942)
You Talk of Art
Even the Gulls of the Cool Atlantic
An Epithalamium
Men and Women Have Meaning Only as Man and Woman

MARGARET AVISON (1918–2007)
Watershed
Twilight
The Christian’s Year in Miniature
Natural/Unnatural
Transit

DON COLES (b. 1927)
Photograph in a Stockholm Newspaper for March 13, 1910
How We All Swiftly
My Son at the Seashore, Age Two
Someone Has Stayed in Stockholm
On a Caspar David Friedrich Painting Entitled ‘Two Men
   Observing the Moon’

RICHARD OUTRAM (1930–2005)
At the Bijou
Creature Becoming Uneasy in Native Element
Turtle
Childhood
Barbed Wire
De Rerum Natura
JAY MACPHERSON (b. 1931)
Ordinary People in the Last Days
The Marriage of Earth and Heaven
Phoenix
Abominable Snowman
The Fisherman
The Beauty of Job’s Daughters

DAVID WEVILL (b. 1935)
The Birth of a Shark
I Think I Am Becoming Myself
A Legend
August
Diamonds

DARYL HINE (b. 1936)
A Bewilderment at the Entrance of the Fat Boy into Eden
Psyche
Patroclus Putting on the Armour of Achilles
Total Immersion
Summer Afternoon
An Adolescent

JOHN THOMPSON (1938–1976)
from Stilt Jack

ERIC ORMSBY (b. 1941)
Flamingos
Origins
The Caliph
Adages of a Grandmother
from Hommage à Robert Melançon

ROBERT ALLEN (1946–2006)
The Newt’s Song
Alexandria’s Waltz
from The Encantadas

ROBERT BRINGHURST (b. 1946)
Essay on Adam
Bone Flute Breathing
Herakleitos
The Beauty of the Weapons

ANNE COMPTON (b. 1947)
What Light Decays
Six Sisters
How We Care for Trees in Winter
We Go Forward
What Matters

A.F. MORITZ (b. 1947)
Artisan and Clerk
The Helmet
Kissinger at the Funeral of Nixon
Place
Old Pet

NORM SIBUM (b. 1947)
Hypatia

MARIUS KOCIEJOWSKI (b. 1949)
Dinu Lipatti plays Chopin’s Sonata in B Minor

ROBYN SARAH (b. 1949)
The Unharmed
Courtney, Mentioned in Passing, Years After
Bounty
Night Visit
Day Visit

ANNE CARSON (b. 1950)
Essay on What I Think About Most
Father’s Old Blue Cardigan
Funeral Marches
Night Confession

MARY DALTON (b. 1950)
Flirrup
Jesus and his Gashes
Burn
Fairy-Struck
Il Dolce Stil Novo

DANIEL DAVID MOSES (b. 1952)
Grandmother of the Glacier
Crow Out Early
Story from the Mouths on a Beach
An Offering of Frost
Complaint of the Strawberry Fieldhand

DIONNE BRAND (b. 1953)
from Thirsty
from Inventory

ELISE PARTRIDGE (b. 1958)
In the Barn
Rural Route
Chemo Side Effects: Memory
Chemo Side Effects: Vision
First Days Back At Work
GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE (b. 1960)
The River Pilgrim: A Letter
Monologue for Selah Bringing Spring to Whylah Falls
Ecclesiastes
Lear of Whylah Falls
This Given Day

STEVEN HEIGHTON (b. 1961)
The Machine Gunner
Address Book
Le Vaisseau d’Or
In Sparta
Selected Monsters

LISA ROBERTSON (b. 1961)
How to Judge
Battle Cry
from The Men

DAVID MCGIMPSEY (b. 1962)
In Memoriam: A.H. Jr.

Index of Authors
Acknowledgements

Todd Swift

Todd Swift was born in Montreal and moved to Britain in 2003. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He has published six collections of poetry, including Seaway: New and Selected Poems (2008) and has edited special sections on Canadian poetry for New American Writin ... read more

Evan Jones

Greek-Canadian poet Evan Jones lives in Manchester. His first collection, Nothing Fell Today But Rain (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2003), was a finalist for the Governor-General's Literary Award for Poetry. He co-edited Modern Canadian Poets (Carcanet, 2010) and his British debut, Paralogues, was published by Carcanet in 2012. He is Lecturer ... read more

[T]he most daring reassessment of our country's canon in years... In a better world, which is to say an alternate reality, this compact and highly readable anthology would be the book your CanLit course makes you buy.
Jason Guriel, Maisonneuve Riots broke out in downtown Montreal earlier in the month after the launch of a new anthology of contemporary Canadian verse at the Bloated Behemoth Book Store. That book, it was later discovered by a man who had subjected it to forensic examination, contained shockingly little verse by poets born in Canada. Several hailed from south of the border, and a third is said to have been resident in London (England), earning a meager living as an antiquarian book dealer and 'practising orientalist', for the past several decades. Margaret Atwood was not even represented in the collection...
Michael Glover, The Bow-Wow Shop The reader...will experience sweet discoveries ranging from the territory of early twentieth century poets W.W.E. Ross and Alfred Bailey to later poets John Thompson and David Wevill, from French-Canadian Anne Hébert to the likes of Robyn Sarah, Don Coles, and Mary Dalton.
Ingrid Ruthig, Northern Poetry Review Swift and Jones... have put together a wonderful anthology.
Michael Lista, National Post This is a lovely book; full poems that really stand up, and to which you will keep returning.
Ian Pople, The Manchester Review I could make a list of all my favourite Canadian poets who are excluded from this volume because of the editors' high modernist interests. But they have defined the story they want to tell, and they have every right to do so. There is no rule saying that editors have to be democratic or representative in their choices. And, given those choices, I like what they have done. I don't even have to be British to appreciate it!
Robert Lecker, Canadian Literature I can think of no equivalent for what Swift and Jones have attempted: to rebuild a national canon from scratch using the most obscure figures. Is it subversive? Well, factor in that Carcanet is one of the U.K.'s leading poetry presses, that the last foreign-published Canadian poetry anthology appeared half a century ago, and that many British readers will take their first cues about Canadian poetry from this book - then you get a sense of the exhilarating sneak attack that has been perpetrated on our image abroad.
Carmine Starnino, Quill & Quire Praise for Evan Jones 'Greek-Canadian poet Evan Jones certainly appears to inhabit easily the worlds of first millennium Rome and early second millennium Byzantium brought to life in these poems [...] It is almost reassuring in our even more turbulent times, to hope that a future Evan Jones might cast an equally cold eye on the reign of our own later emperors.'

The High Window

'These are quiet poems that manage, with remarkable and deceptive simplicity, to get under the skin. I am delighted that lockdown made me acquainted with them.'

Antony Mair

'The trajectory of Jones' style deepens and intensifies as the book goes on; its music beautifully controlled to gather and sharpen. But, although his subjects are all aristocrats, there isn't a grandiloquent, unnecessary phrase in the whole collection. Plutarch and Gibbon may sit behind Evan Jones but Later Emperors is a lovely, unique working, whose contemporary relevance is never overt but subtly and sensitively implicit.'

Ian Pople, The North
'Jones's spare, evocative, and imagistic verse offers, through half-glimpsed narratives of ambition and loss, a rumination on the transience of things in this world [...] Later Emperors is a lyrical book, somber yet lovely. Rare among works of poetry today, it offers not only beauty but also a wisdom rooted in time and timelessness.'

Benjamin Myers, World Literature Today

'Later Emperors shows it's possible to write with the "sound of sense" while creating an allegory for our time. Jones uses the Roman Empire as a blueprint for learning from history, But his poems are not judgmental. They let readers see venality and decline, drawing from a range of personas steeped in the capricious nature of twin political valences' power and appetite.'

Nyla Matuk, The Vehicule Press Blog

'The poems in Later Emperors surprise and delight like those incisive, wry and honest inscriptions that come down to us from antiquity seemingly having survived everything, not least history's ravages. At the same time, there's a deeply distinctive literary wit at work in this book as Jones's lines limn (and update) the lives of the fleetingly powerful with the acuity and concision of Martial, the wit and heart of Horace. How those later emperors resemble the tyrants of our own time! What a skilled guide to them we have in Evan Jones!'
Don Share
Evan Jones is an intelligent, allusive poet who has elegantly synthesized his roots in Greek culture. These quietly serious poems throw up glimpses of dream and myth, and do so in a context of real thoughtfulness, free of rhetoric but rich in formal control.
Fiona Sampson

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Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology Poems in English Edited by Todd Swift and Evan Jones Categories: 21st Century, Anthologies, Canadian Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (220 pages) (Pub. Nov 2010) 9781857549386 Out of Stock Digital access available through Exact Editions Description Excerpt Editors Contents Reviews Including poetry by: A.M. Klein Anne Wilkinson Irving Layton George Johnston Margaret Avison David Wevill Eric Ormsby Norm Sibum Marius Kociejowski Anne Carson Dionne Brand George Elliott Clarke Steven Heighton Cosmopolitan, hybrid and eloquent, modern Canadian poetry is still, for many readers outside Canada, one of the great undiscovered terrains of world literature. Modern Canadian Poets sets out to end that neglect, redefining the connections between Canada and the international poetry world. From poets born in the early years of the twentieth century to those writing in the twenty-first, Modern Canadian Poets explores a lineage of modernist, multilingual, culturally pluralist writers who have engaged with other English- and French-speaking traditions in new ways, to make a literature that is unmistakably Canadian and international. The thirty-five poets included represent a wide spectrum of Canadian poetry of the last hundred years in its variety of styles and traditions. Among them are French Canadian poets in translations by anglophone writers, and poets from the First Nations, Caribbean-Canadian and Africadian communities. From their vantage point as Canadian poets living outside Canada, Evan Jones and Todd Swift draw a new map of this unique literary landscape. Introduction W.W.E. ROSS (1894–1966) The Diver The Old Song Moonlight By the River The Vessel The City ALFRED BAILEY (1905–1997) The Unreturning The Isosceles Lighthouse The Question, Is It? Border River Miramichi Lightning The Bumpkin and the Bobcat A.M. KLEIN (1909–1972) The Rocking Chair Portrait of the Poet as Landscape Montreal Lone Bather Heirloom JOHN GLASSCO (1909–1981) Quebec Farmhouse Brummell at Calais The Game [Autrefois] [A propos de cet enfant] ANNE WILKINSON (1910–1961) Lullaby Lens Little Men Slip into Death Nature Be Damned A Cautionary Tale TV Hockey IRVING LAYTON (1912–2006) Berry Picking Keine Lazarovitch 1870-1959 Marché Municipale GEORGE JOHNSTON (1913–2004) Firefly Evening The Pool War on the Periphery The Bargain Sale Spring Moon October DOUGLAS LEPAN (1914–1998) Nimbus The Wounded Prince Coureurs de Bois Canoe-Trip ANNE HÉBERT (1916–2000) The Closed Room Mystery of the Verb Snow Too Tightly Fitted Captive Gods P.K. PAGE (1916–2010) Cry Ararat! Planet Earth After Rain Arras Man with One Small Hand JOAN MURRAY (1917–1942) You Talk of Art Even the Gulls of the Cool Atlantic An Epithalamium Men and Women Have Meaning Only as Man and Woman MARGARET AVISON (1918–2007) Watershed Twilight The Christian’s Year in Miniature Natural/Unnatural Transit DON COLES (b. 1927) Photograph in a Stockholm Newspaper for March 13, 1910 How We All Swiftly My Son at the Seashore, Age Two Someone Has Stayed in Stockholm On a Caspar David Friedrich Painting Entitled ‘Two Men Observing the Moon’ RICHARD OUTRAM (1930–2005) At the Bijou Creature Becoming Uneasy in Native Element Turtle Childhood Barbed Wire De Rerum Natura JAY MACPHERSON (b. 1931) Ordinary People in the Last Days The Marriage of Earth and Heaven Phoenix Abominable Snowman The Fisherman The Beauty of Job’s Daughters DAVID WEVILL (b. 1935) The Birth of a Shark I Think I Am Becoming Myself A Legend August Diamonds DARYL HINE (b. 1936) A Bewilderment at the Entrance of the Fat Boy into Eden Psyche Patroclus Putting on the Armour of Achilles Total Immersion Summer Afternoon An Adolescent JOHN THOMPSON (1938–1976) from Stilt Jack ERIC ORMSBY (b. 1941) Flamingos Origins The Caliph Adages of a Grandmother from Hommage à Robert Melançon ROBERT ALLEN (1946–2006) The Newt’s Song Alexandria’s Waltz from The Encantadas ROBERT BRINGHURST (b. 1946) Essay on Adam Bone Flute Breathing Herakleitos The Beauty of the Weapons ANNE COMPTON (b. 1947) What Light Decays Six Sisters How We Care for Trees in Winter We Go Forward What Matters A.F. MORITZ (b. 1947) Artisan and Clerk The Helmet Kissinger at the Funeral of Nixon Place Old Pet NORM SIBUM (b. 1947) Hypatia MARIUS KOCIEJOWSKI (b. 1949) Dinu Lipatti plays Chopin’s Sonata in B Minor ROBYN SARAH (b. 1949) The Unharmed Courtney, Mentioned in Passing, Years After Bounty Night Visit Day Visit ANNE CARSON (b. 1950) Essay on What I Think About Most Father’s Old Blue Cardigan Funeral Marches Night Confession MARY DALTON (b. 1950) Flirrup Jesus and his Gashes Burn Fairy-Struck Il Dolce Stil Novo DANIEL DAVID MOSES (b. 1952) Grandmother of the Glacier Crow Out Early Story from the Mouths on a Beach An Offering of Frost Complaint of the Strawberry Fieldhand DIONNE BRAND (b. 1953) from Thirsty from Inventory ELISE PARTRIDGE (b. 1958) In the Barn Rural Route Chemo Side Effects: Memory Chemo Side Effects: Vision First Days Back At Work GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE (b. 1960) The River Pilgrim: A Letter Monologue for Selah Bringing Spring to Whylah Falls Ecclesiastes Lear of Whylah Falls This Given Day STEVEN HEIGHTON (b. 1961) The Machine Gunner Address Book Le Vaisseau d’Or In Sparta Selected Monsters LISA ROBERTSON (b. 1961) How to Judge Battle Cry from The Men DAVID MCGIMPSEY (b. 1962) In Memoriam: A.H. Jr. Index of Authors Acknowledgements Todd Swift Todd Swift was born in Montreal and moved to Britain in 2003. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He has published six collections of poetry, including Seaway: New and Selected Poems (2008) and has edited special sections on Canadian poetry for New American Writin ... read more Evan Jones Greek-Canadian poet Evan Jones lives in Manchester. His first collection, Nothing Fell Today But Rain (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2003), was a finalist for the Governor-General's Literary Award for Poetry. He co-edited Modern Canadian Poets (Carcanet, 2010) and his British debut, Paralogues, was published by Carcanet in 2012. He is Lecturer ... read more [T]he most daring reassessment of our country's canon in years... In a better world, which is to say an alternate reality, this compact and highly readable anthology would be the book your CanLit course makes you buy. Jason Guriel, Maisonneuve Riots broke out in downtown Montreal earlier in the month after the launch of a new anthology of contemporary Canadian verse at the Bloated Behemoth Book Store. That book, it was later discovered by a man who had subjected it to forensic examination, contained shockingly little verse by poets born in Canada. Several hailed from south of the border, and a third is said to have been resident in London (England), earning a meager living as an antiquarian book dealer and 'practising orientalist', for the past several decades. Margaret Atwood was not even represented in the collection... Michael Glover, The Bow-Wow Shop The reader...will experience sweet discoveries ranging from the territory of early twentieth century poets W.W.E. Ross and Alfred Bailey to later poets John Thompson and David Wevill, from French-Canadian Anne Hébert to the likes of Robyn Sarah, Don Coles, and Mary Dalton. Ingrid Ruthig, Northern Poetry Review Swift and Jones... have put together a wonderful anthology. Michael Lista, National Post This is a lovely book; full poems that really stand up, and to which you will keep returning. Ian Pople, The Manchester Review I could make a list of all my favourite Canadian poets who are excluded from this volume because of the editors' high modernist interests. But they have defined the story they want to tell, and they have every right to do so. There is no rule saying that editors have to be democratic or representative in their choices. And, given those choices, I like what they have done. I don't even have to be British to appreciate it! Robert Lecker, Canadian Literature I can think of no equivalent for what Swift and Jones have attempted: to rebuild a national canon from scratch using the most obscure figures. Is it subversive? Well, factor in that Carcanet is one of the U.K.'s leading poetry presses, that the last foreign-published Canadian poetry anthology appeared half a century ago, and that many British readers will take their first cues about Canadian poetry from this book - then you get a sense of the exhilarating sneak attack that has been perpetrated on our image abroad. Carmine Starnino, Quill & Quire Praise for Evan Jones 'Greek-Canadian poet Evan Jones certainly appears to inhabit easily the worlds of first millennium Rome and early second millennium Byzantium brought to life in these poems [...] It is almost reassuring in our even more turbulent times, to hope that a future Evan Jones might cast an equally cold eye on the reign of our own later emperors.' The High Window 'These are quiet poems that manage, with remarkable and deceptive simplicity, to get under the skin. I am delighted that lockdown made me acquainted with them.' Antony Mair 'The trajectory of Jones' style deepens and intensifies as the book goes on; its music beautifully controlled to gather and sharpen. But, although his subjects are all aristocrats, there isn't a grandiloquent, unnecessary phrase in the whole collection. Plutarch and Gibbon may sit behind Evan Jones but Later Emperors is a lovely, unique working, whose contemporary relevance is never overt but subtly and sensitively implicit.' Ian Pople, The North 'Jones's spare, evocative, and imagistic verse offers, through half-glimpsed narratives of ambition and loss, a rumination on the transience of things in this world [...] Later Emperors is a lyrical book, somber yet lovely. Rare among works of poetry today, it offers not only beauty but also a wisdom rooted in time and timelessness.' Benjamin Myers, World Literature Today 'Later Emperors shows it's possible to write with the "sound of sense" while creating an allegory for our time. Jones uses the Roman Empire as a blueprint for learning from history, But his poems are not judgmental. They let readers see venality and decline, drawing from a range of personas steeped in the capricious nature of twin political valences' power and appetite.' Nyla Matuk, The Vehicule Press Blog 'The poems in Later Emperors surprise and delight like those incisive, wry and honest inscriptions that come down to us from antiquity seemingly having survived everything, not least history's ravages. At the same time, there's a deeply distinctive literary wit at work in this book as Jones's lines limn (and update) the lives of the fleetingly powerful with the acuity and concision of Martial, the wit and heart of Horace. How those later emperors resemble the tyrants of our own time! What a skilled guide to them we have in Evan Jones!' Don Share Evan Jones is an intelligent, allusive poet who has elegantly synthesized his roots in Greek culture. These quietly serious poems throw up glimpses of dream and myth, and do so in a context of real thoughtfulness, free of rhetoric but rich in formal control. Fiona Sampson You might also be interested in: Smoke and Lilacs Norm Sibum	Share this... Quick Links Carcanet Poetry Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Lives and Letters PN Review Video Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! The Carcanet Blog Emotional Support Horse: Claudine Toutoungi read more PN Review 279: Elegies by Lorna Goodison read more Conjurors: Julian Orde read more Citizen Poet: Eavan Boland read more Library Lives: Stella Halkyard read more Tablets: Dunya Mikhail read more
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Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology

Poems in English

Edited by Todd Swift and Evan Jones