Canada
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Published:23rd Oct '97
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
John Hartley Williams’s Canada explores a country of the mind, where whatever mania comes to mind becomes its own reality, and writing happens automatically. In Canada, poems arrive out of the ether like the fabled, lantern-jawed Mountie coming to the rescue out of nowhere. Others are on their way back into the ether, transmissions from the brain of an uneasy redman. These are poems which make you feel like the hairs on a pony’s neck. Canada opens in the backwoods of autobiography and narrative, then reports crisply on the alarums of sex and desire. After crossing the frontier, a final coda blows innocence off the map for good and all. Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 1997.
Rude, innocent and larky, it’s also weirdly apt for the seriousness of much of its subject-matter… the best illustration yet of the range and authority of this bizarrely underrated poet. -- Sean O'Brien * Times Literary Supplement *
Williams is the poet who first excited me about the inexhaustible possibilities of poetry. He still believes that poetry is about the celebration of the imagination, strange stories and odd phrases that lodge in a fold of the mind and flower one day into something exotic, unnerving and not at all proper. -- David Kennedy * The Wide Skirt *
- Short-listed for T S Eliot Prize 1997
ISBN: 9781852244316
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 255g
128 pages