Bøker i Laurier Poetry-serien

Increasingly known as the poets poet, Governor Generals Awardwinner Phil Hall has long been a constructor of intricate sequences, collecting and arranging lines and phrases, artifacts, and small revelations. He writes on influences, literary and local; he writes of rural Ontario, attempting to comprehend a deeply personal family violence; he stitches together lines and tall tales and fables from his life and the stories that float around the ethos of his variety of Ontario wilds. Halls isnt a poetry carved into perfect diamond form but a poetry whittled from scores of found materials pulled apart and rearranged. This volume is not so much a selected poems as it is a reshuffle, a sampler from the span of Halls published work. Guthrie Clothing is a collage-selection by Hall. Lines, stanzas, and poem-fragments are reworked and patterned into a new sequence, a fresh structure. The afterword consists of an important new essay-poem by Hall as well. It argues against irony from a rural perspective and amounts to Halls ars poetica. In an encompassing introduction, rob mclennan explores Halls four-plus decades of bricolage.

Selected works from Marilyn Dumont, a Cree/Métis poet who has written about Métis kinscapes and Métis presence from her first book in 1997 to now.

This selected work of Sue Goyette's poetry brings together work from eight books of poetry to show that Sue Goyette has sustained a practice of witnessing and reinterpreting the world for her readers. Introduction by Bart Vautour. Interview with the poet by Erin Wunker.

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Otiono's two pulished collections, Voices in the Rainbow, and Love in a Time of Nightmares, and includes previously unpublished new poems.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.

Collects the finest work of accomplished Indigenous poet Duncan Mercredi, from his first book in 1991 to recent unpublished poems.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 Metis storytelling but also with the clamour and the music of the streets.

Presents 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.

Presents 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.

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.

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.

This collection brings together representative work from Sina Queyras's poetic oeuvre. Queyras is at the forefront of contemporary discussions of genre, gender, and criticism of poetry. Her influential blog-turned-literary-magazine, Lemon Hound , published up-and-coming writers as well as work by established literary figures in Canada and abroad. The title, Barking & Biting, makes reference to the tagline of Lemon Hound: "e;more bark than bite."e; Erin Wunker's introduction situates Queyras's poetry within ongoing debates around genre and gender. It suggests that Queyras's writing, be it literary critical, poetic, or prose, is precise and probing but avoids toothless critical positioning. It pays particular attention to Queyras's poetic innovations and intertextual references to other women writers, and suggests that read together Queyras's oeuvre embodies an engaged feminist attentionwhat Joan Retallack has called a "e;poethics,"e; where poetry and ethics are bound together as a mode of inquiry and aesthetics. Queyras's poems trace a consistent concern with both poetic genealogies and the status of women. Thus far, twenty-first century poetics have been preoccupied with two ongoing conversations: the perceived divide between lyric and conceptual writing, and the underrepresentation of women and other non-dominant subjects. While these two topics may seem epistemologically and ethically separate, they are in fact irrevocably intertwined. Questions of form are, at their root, questions of visibility and recognizability. Will the reader know a poem when she sees it? And will that seeing alter her perception of the world? And how is the form of the poem altered, productively or un-, by the identity politics of its author? These are the questions that undergird Queyras's poetry and guide the editorial selections. Queyras's poetics pay dogged attention to questions of both representation and genre. In each of her poetry collections she inhabits tenets of the traditional lyric but leverages the genre open to let conceptualism in. This is demonstrated in her afterword, "e;Lyric Conceptualism, a Manifesto in Progress,"e; which was first published on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet the Blog . In it Queyras puts forward a set of maxims about the possibilities of a new hybrid, the conceptual lyric poem.

Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 19892009 presents texts from the last two decades of work by Steve McCaffery, one of the most influential and innovative of contemporary poets. The volume focuses on selections from McCafferys major texts, including The Black Debt , Theory of Sediment , The Cheat of Words , and Slightly Left of Thinking , but also features a substantial number of previously ungathered poems. As playful as they are cerebral, McCafferys poems stage an incessant departure from conventional lyrical and narrative methods of making meaning. For those encountering McCafferys work for the first time as well as for those who have followed the twists and turns of his astonishingly heterogeneous poetic trajectory over the past four decadesthis volume is essential reading.

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 concernslove, 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 materialityboth visual and auralof language, often beyond the purely recountable, representational, or depictive.

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.

Opening doors, dreaming awake, tracing networks of music and meaning, Marlatts 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 Brossards 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 Marlatts 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 Knutsons deeply attentive critical introduction and by Marlatts 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.

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 themeswork, mortality, love, lust, friendship, the natural worldmake his work a poetry of human inevitabilities, a poetry that exults in the inevitability of seeing poetry in the everyday. Wayman's craft is poesis (from the Ancient Greek "e;to make"e;)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, "e;Work and Silence,"e; 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.

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 flneur , impoverished and keenly observant, writing from a position of "e;communion-in-isolation."e; 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-"e;the desire to create new codes of hearing"e; and "e;writing-to-heal"e;-and how they are reflected in the collection.

Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground contains thirty-five of F.R. Scotts poems from across the five decades of his career. Scotts 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 Scotts work: in the contexts of Canadian modernism and of contemporary literary history, respectively.

This volume features thirty-five of Don McKay's best poems, which are selected with a contextualizing introduction by Mira 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 processits 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.

Social Poesis introduces readers to the work of one of Canada's most exciting and challenging poets. Through selections from across Rachel Zolf's poetic oeuvre, this book foregrounds the philosophical, ethical, and political questions that inform Zolf's poetry. Selections range from early poems in which Zolf explores transhistorical trauma and queer subjectivity to more recent writings that examine militarism, settler colonialism, and other forms of state-sanctioned violence. Zolf's poetry enacts what she calls a "e;social poesis"e;; she is attuned to questions of ethical responsibility and the role, and limitations, of poetry as a tool for ethical thinking, political engagement, accountability, and bearing witness. Heather Milne's introduction examines Zolf's compositional strategies, tracing the evolution of Zolf's writing from an autobiographical poetics, in which Zolf as subject/speaker is locatable, toward a poetics that moves beyond the self to address political and ethical relations among subjects of geopolitics and settler colonialism. In her afterword, Zolf focuses on her most recent work, in which poems are composed almost entirely from archival sources and enact a kind of collective assemblage of enunciation.

Space Between Her Lips presents the first selected works of one of Canada's most important poets of the last few decades. Margaret Christakos writes vibrant, exciting, and intellectually challenging poetry. She plays language games that bring a probing and disturbing humour to serious themes that range from childhood and children to women in contemporary techno-capitalist society to feminist literary theory, and so much more. Gregory Betts introduction to the collection highlights her formal diversity and her unique combination of feminist and avant-garde affinities. He connects the geographies of her life including Northern Ontario where she was raised, downtown Toronto where she studied with cutting-edge authors and artists like bpNichol and Michael Snow, and Montreal where she integrated with the country s leading feminist authors and thinkers with her polyphonic experimentation. While traversing the problem of bifurcated identities, Christakos is funny at a deeply semiotic level, wickedly wry, exposing something about the way we think by examining the way we speak of it. In her afterword, Christakos maps out a philosophy of writing that highlights her self-consciousness of the foibles of language but also deep concern for the themes she writes about, including her career-length exploration of self-discovery, hetero-, queer and bi-sexual sexualities, motherhood, self-care, and linguistic alienation. Indeed, Margaret Christakos is a whole-body poet, writing with the materiality of language about the movement of interior thought to embodied experience in the world.