"Most long poems contain lyric occasions. Here is an amazingly sustained lyric that contains traces of other commodities." -Robert Kroetsch Sheila Murphy and Douglas Barbour extend their singular poetic vision of that elusive third I/eye in Continuations 2. The new lyric voice sustained (within) these labyrinthine verses does so by virtue of its authors' pitch-perfect collaborative process. For ten years they have kept their song alive via email, pulsing jazz-like variations and haunting r...

The bold essays that make up Reading the Difficulties offer case studies in and strategies for reading innovative poetry.Definitions of what constitutes innovative poetry are innumerable and are offered from every quarter. Some critics and poets argue that innovative poetry concerns free association (John Ashbery), others that experimental poetry is a “re-staging” of language (Bruce Andrews) or a syntactic and cognitive break with the past (Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian). ...

Jonathan Ball's Clock?re is a suite of poetic blueprints for imaginary plays that would be impossible to produce – plays in which, for example, the director burns out the sun, actors murder their audience or the laws of physics are de?led. The poems in a sense replace the need for drama, and are predicated on the idea that modern theatre lacks both 'clocks' and '?re' and thus fails to offer its audiences immediate, violent engagement. They sometimes resemble the scores for Fluxus ...

Joyfully melding knowing humour and torqued-up wordplay, Holbrook’s second collection is a comic fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical turns deadly serious. Holbrook's poems don’t use humour as much as they deconstruct the comic impulse, exposing its roots in the political, the psychological and the emotional life of the mind. Many of these...

**A Globe and Mail Best BookA debut collection from a startling new voice in Canadian poetry.**The poems in Admission Requirements attempt to discover what is required of us when we cut across our material and psychic geographies. Simultaneously full and empty of its origins, the self is continually taxed of any certainties and ways of being. The speaker in these poems is engaged in a kind of fieldwork, surveying gardens, communities, and the haphazard cit...

The poetry in Furious is charged with Erin Moure's characteristic energy and wit as she explores the limits of pure reason and the language of power. There is, too, a fresh and often celebratory look at love, and, in an unusual finale, The Acts, Moure challenges us to explore a feminist aesthetic: of thinking, of the page, of working life and the possibility of poetry. Furious was the winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1988.

This compilation from one of Canada's most acclaimed writers spans four decades and six volumes. Often bittersweet and occasionallyenigmatic, these poems represent Pittman's infinite talent. Targeted at a wide circle of readers, this book gives poetry back to the people, where it truly belongs.

If it were necessary to tell someone where I am, I'd say the spheres of Kepler resonate like icicles. I'd say I have loved. These are high-energy poems, riddled with wit and legerdemain and jolted by the philosophy and science of time. 'Time's not the market, it's the bustle; / not the price but worth," he muses, sailing through the rhythms and algorithms of a world made concrete by Samuel Johnson, before it was undone by Niels Bohr. Tierney's narrators grapple with the gap between what's ...

Ricochet is a bilingual collection of word sonnets by one of the chief innovators of the form, Seymour Mayne. It includes three sequences of pithy and evocative poems that encapsulate moments of sharp perception while also drawing attention to instants of humour that suddenly appear in daily life.Concise and visual in effect, word sonnets are fourteen line poems, with one word per line. Frequently allusive and imagistic, they can also be irreverent and playful. While infor...

Notable Book in the 2005 Kiriyama Prize and longlisted for the 2005 ReLit AwardsCatherine Greenwood draws on the stories and legends which surround the development of cultured pearls by Mikimoto, the fabulous Pearl King, to engage a rich array of themes, including the clash between an aesthetics of refinement and nuance, and mass manufacture. With discerning wit and a large range of styles and voices, she holds up each subject for contemplation as though it were a ...

"In this stunning collection, Bauke Kamstra has scooped out the hollow of nature and returned with the expressions of its soul. Everywhere the poet looks, he sees acutely: a tree 'has earned/its suffering/and its pieces/falling,' and of the people who live in its river weathering, Kamstra remembers that 'my mother's accordion/played so/many hymns/but the ecstasy/was all hers.' From the opening poem, in which a woman's washing reveals her violence, to his lament that he is returning with a ...

A radiant collection of new poems from one of Canada's most renowned and well-read poets.The poems in Lorna Crozier's rich and wide-ranging new collection, a modern bestiary and a book of mourning, are both shadowed and illuminated by the passing of time, the small mechanics of the body as it ages, the fine-tuning of what a life becomes when parents and old friends are gone. Brilliantly poised between the mythic and the everyday, the anecdotal and the delicately lyrical, these poem...