Poetry

Blues singer, preacher, cultural critic, exile, Africadian, high modernist, spoken word artist, Canadian poet—these are but some of the voices of George Elliott Clarke. In a selection of Clarke’s best work from his early poetry to his most recent, Blues and Bliss: The Poetry of George Elliott Clarke offers readers an impressive cross-section o …

In the fall of 1373, the city of Florence commissioned Giovanni Boccaccio to give lectures on Dante for the general population. These lectures, undeniably the most learned of all the early commentaries, came to be known as the Expositions on Dante's Divine Comedy. Though interrupted at Inferno XVII, they provide profound, near-contemporary interpre …

Body Music reveals the remarkable depth and range of Dennis Lee as a poet and thinker.

In eleven ground-breaking essays, Lee explores the experience of body music: the dance of energy from which poems arise. Whether he is discussing rhythm as a form of cosmology, examining children's verse, or probing what it means to worship without belief, his ex …

By turns celebratory and sceptical, 'Career Limiting Moves' is a selection of essays and reviews drawn from a decade of immersion in Canadian poetry. Inhabiting a milieu in which unfriendly remarks are typically spoken 'sotto voce' “if at all?Wells has consistently said what he thinks aloud. The pieces in this collection comprise revisionist asse …

Christ and Satan is the title of the last of four poems in the eleventh-century Junius XI manuscript of Anglo-Saxon poetry. This critical edition contains text, glossary, textual and explanatory notes, and an essay surveying former criticisms and setting forth the author’s ideas on the poem’s principle of unity.

Of particular value to student …

One of Canada’s most distinguished poets, Dionne Brand explores and chronicles how history shapes human existence, in particular the lives of those ruptured and scattered by New World slaveries and modern crises. This republication of three early volumes presents a view of the trajectory of her poetic journey. Read retrospectively, the earlier w …

During his lifetime, Dante was condemned as corrupt and banned from Florence on pain of death. But in 1329, eight years after his death, he was again viciously condemned—this time as a heretic and false prophet—by Friar Guido Vernani. From Vernani’s inquisitorial viewpoint, the author of the Commedia “seduced” his readers by offering the …