Intimate Letters comprises the seventh book of an ongoing long poem in prose called The Invisible World Is in Decline. Its title borrows from a string quartet by Leoš Jánaček, a profoundly emotional piece written late in the composer’s life when he had fallen in love with a younger woman. It also points towards the intimacy of letters themselves, the visible pieces that make up language. This collection begins with love poems, then moves to a section (“Wretched in This Alone”) dominated by...

The stunning conclusion to a 40-year poetic projectIn the tradition of earlier modernist long poems like Ezra Pound’s Cantos and bp Nichol’s The Martyrology, The Invisible World Is in Decline: Book IX is full of startling poetic music and imagery while addressing concerns to which every reader will respond: the life of the heart as well as life during COVID-19, love as well as death, philosophy as well as emotion. The poems are deeply res...

A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021The thirteenth installment of Canada's annual volume of essays showcases diverse nonfiction writing from across the country.“The exceptional essay,” writes editor Bruce Whiteman, “derives from a passionate feeling, love and anger being perhaps its upper and lower limits, coexisting with a desire for truth, and it aims for the radiance of what is.” In the 2021 edition of Best Canadian Essays...

Essays and critical writing drawn from a wide-ranging fifty-year career in lettersDrawn from a body of essays and reviews written over the course of nearly fifty years, Work to Be Done showcases both the depth and breadth of Bruce Whiteman’s critical work. Widely published across Canada and the United States, Whiteman is an accomplished poet, translator, and scholar, and his broad interests have never been limited to any one subject area. He moves between c...

From the "rubble [that] is the order of the day" in the opening poem to the longing for a "radiant happy ending" in the book's final line, Tablature is a book of poems that traverses a great swath of the heart's experience in compelling and lucid poetic language.Bruce Whiteman's first book of poems in traditional lined form in thirty years is by turns learned and allusive, and emotionally expressive and despairing. These poems engage three large and powerful subjects: the ...

From the "rubble [that] is the order of the day" in the opening poem to the longing for a "radiant happy ending" in the book's final line, Tablature is a book of poems that traverses a great swath of the heart's experience in compelling and lucid poetic language.Bruce Whiteman's first book of poems in traditional lined form in thirty years is by turns learned and allusive, and emotionally expressive and despairing. These poems engage three large and powerful subjects: the ...

John Ashbery's first published book of poems, handpicked from the slush pile by none other than W. H. AudenAshbery's Some Trees narrowly beat out a manuscript by fellow New York poet Frank O'Hara to win the renowned Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—after the book had been rejected in an early screening round. Competition judge W. H. Auden was perhaps the first to note, in his original preface to Some Trees, the meditative polyphony that d...

Different poems, most of them from a prose poetry perspective, even when they have short lines. The rambling stories of a middle-aged woman about life, love, death or immortality. The self of the poet merging with the environment, the pain of being alone, the modus vivendi of getting older are translucent through these filigree of thoughts and images.

Appropriately for a book haunted by music, Katharine Towers’ poems exhibit an almost pianistic sense of timing, touch and tone. In The Floating Man, Towers writes about weight and weightlessness, presence and absence, the body in space, and our oblique relationship with the natural world, always with a wonderful sense of compositional balance; she is expert at registering the huge emotional shifts effected by the smallest things, whether the scent of apples, the slant of the light...

Selected poems of author and musician Peter Gammond

All too often, life happens to us without us pausing to reflect on what we have and how it makes us feel. That’s where a work like Love's Illusions: Poetry & Thoughts comes in. Poet Margaret Dent’s delightful and thought-provoking poetry explores how our connections with nature and others shape our lives. Love, desire, friendship, loneliness, loss, and our interactions with nature are experienced and considered in the over 70 poems and quotes in this collection. Dent’s purposeful reflections ...

Poems of great passion and tenderness, as close to rapture as a writer can get and still hold on. E. Alex Pierce's voice can be heard echoing down the long corridors of memory and myth. It's not that these poems live in the past; instead, they manage to bring it back to life with uncanny sensual details and an urgency that makes you realize some fires never really go out. Vox Humana is all lilt and discipline in its courtliness, its surrender to the theatre of the moment at its most alive....