{"id":1037,"date":"2010-12-12T13:25:14","date_gmt":"2010-12-12T12:25:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1037"},"modified":"2016-01-23T19:37:28","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T18:37:28","slug":"modern-canadian-poets-an-anthology-of-poems-in-english-edited-by-evan-jones-and-todd-swift-carcanet-1895","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1037","title":{"rendered":"<em>Modern Canadian Poets: An anthology of Poems in English<\/em>, ed. by Evan Jones and Todd Swift (Carcanet) \u00a318.95"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An anthology of Canadian poetry published by a British publisher, and edited by two Canadian ex-pats does have an in-built advantage. <span> <\/span>On this side of the great pond, at least, the readership won\u2019t be party to the inevitable cries of foul play over the absences and inclusions, and, to a lesser extent, the editors won\u2019t be bad-mouthed in the streets of London and Manchester. <span> <\/span>That said, Jones and Swift stake out the parameters of their anthology early in their introduction:<span> <\/span>no \u2018loud-mouthed, formless Everyman whose verse dominates many Canadian anthologies\u2019 \u2013 so that\u2019s Al Purdy and Patrick Lane out, I take it! <span> <\/span>And none of the really major figures whose stuff we actually know \u2018over here\u2019 \u2013 Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje;<span> <\/span>these latter two on the grounds that, basically, verse is not their major concern, or, in the case of Cohen, he\u2019s too well-known already. <\/span><\/p>\n<p>At the same time, their anthology is, itself, corralled by demography. <span> <\/span>A number of Jones and Swift\u2019s poets inevitably came to Canada as emigrants, or the children of emigrants. <span> <\/span>And while they acknowledge the vastness of Canada\u2019s geography as a major signifier, they want to emphasise the variant populations of Canada, its cosmopolitanism. Thus \u2018The poets in this anthology are Canadian by birth, citizenship, residency, choice, exile, marriage, accident or ancestry.\u2019 In effect, their attempt at deciding who is a \u2018Canadian poet\u2019 is as fraught as any of the previous attempts. <span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>This large (in every sense) anthology begins with some terrific poems.<span> <\/span>Modernism seems to have struck deep into the hearts of Canadian poets working in the early, mid-twentieth century. <span> <\/span>And the first poets in this book, W.W.E. Ross, John Glassco, A.M.Klein and Alfred Bailey seem particularly smitten with modernism\u2019s desire to work the image to its limit and beyond. <span> <\/span>The poems by Klein and Bailey seem major pieces by anybody\u2019s standard; particularly the latter\u2019s \u2018The Isoceles Lighthouse\u2019, \u2018The empty lighthouse stood where the man who built it died.\/Skulls, ribs, hips, and thigh-shanks,\/found there,\/seven in number,\/gave it a name to leave it alone, and yet -\/What was it drew the eye, the questioning thought\u2026\u2019 And Klein\u2019s \u2018Portrait of the Poet as Landscape\u2019 with its seven rolling sections is a tour-de-force. <span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Another great strength of this anthology is Jones and Swift\u2019s inclusion of wonderful women writers right from the start of the book. <span> <\/span>And the obvious care they have taken to search out writers who have dropped out of view. <span> <\/span>An example of the latter is Joan Murray born in London but who studied in New York with, amongst others, W.H.Auden whose influence, but not deadening hand, is felt in poems such as, the wonderful dialogue poem \u2018Epithalamium\u2019, and who died tragically young. <span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Among the younger poets present here, some have some presence in the UK:<span> <\/span>Anne Carsons, primarily, but also Don Coles, Eric Ormsby and Norm Sibum.<span> <\/span>But the newer poets introduced to the UK for the first time are formidably strong; ranging from the tender sensualities of Dionne Brand to the narrative ventriloquisms of George Elliot Clarke. <span> <\/span>This is a lovely book;<span> <\/span>full poems that really stand up, and to which you will keep returning. <\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An anthology of Canadian poetry published by a British publisher, and edited by two Canadian ex-pats does have an in-built advantage. On this side of the great pond, at least, the readership won\u2019t be party to the inevitable cries of foul play over the absences and inclusions, and, to a lesser extent, the editors won\u2019t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[64,65,106,263],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Modern Canadian Poets: An anthology of Poems in English, ed. by Evan Jones and Todd Swift (Carcanet) \u00a318.95 - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1037\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Modern Canadian Poets: An anthology of Poems in English, ed. by Evan Jones and Todd Swift (Carcanet) \u00a318.95 - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"An anthology of Canadian poetry published by a British publisher, and edited by two Canadian ex-pats does have an in-built advantage. 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