R Bringhurst
Robert Bringhurst is one of Canada's most respected poets and most probing cultural historians. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, lectured on Native American art and oral literature at universities around the world, studied linguistics at MIT under Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, and worked as a professional translator for Arabic and Greek. Bringhurst began to study the Haida language in 1982. His translations of Haida oral poetry have since appeared in major scholarly journals and in Brian Swann's groundbreaking anthology Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America.
Being in Being
Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay was born in the Haida village of Qquuna about 1827. Crippled by an injury in middle age, he devoted himself to the art of telling stories. He could neither read nor write, and it is purely a matter of luck that his work survives. But so great were his talents that he remains the most important figure in all of Haida l …
Black Canoe
It is rare for a single work of sculpture to become the subject of a book at any time, much less at the moment of its installation. But Bill Reid's Spirit of Haida Gwaii is no ordinary sculpture. Commissioned for the courtyard of the new Canadian chancery in Washington, DC, it sits directly across the street from the National Gallery and is destine …
Everywhere Being is Dancing
In this companion volume to The Tree of Meaning (GP, 2006), Robert Bringhurst collects talks and meditations under the principle that “everything is related to everything else.” His studies of poetry, polyphonics, oral literature, storytelling, translation, mythology, homogeny, cultural ecology, literary criticism and typography all build upon …
Nine Visits to the Mythworld
In the Fall of 1900, a young American anthropologist named John Swanton arrived in the Haida country, on the Northwest Coast of North America, intending to learn everything he could about Haida mythology. He spent the next ten months phonetically transcribing several thousand pages of myths, stories, histories and songs in the Haida language. Swant …
Selected Poems
This new volume brings together selections from several of Bringhurst’s collections of poetry, including The Beauty of the Weapons and The Calling, along with complete works including the polyphonic Conversations with a Toad and The Blue Roofs of Japan, and a series of new poems, “The Living.”
The collection’s geography wanders from Japan to …
Solitary Raven
A seminal collection of writing from one of Canada's most revered artists, spanning forty years of his life.
When Haida sculptor and Canadian icon Bill Reid died, in the spring of 1998, he was more widely and more fervently admired than any other Native artist in North America. Although Reid attained his greatest fame in the visual arts, words were …
Story as Sharp as a Knife, A
A seminal collection of Haida myths and legends; now in a gorgeous new package.
The linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last great Haida-speaking storytellers, poets and historians from the fall of 1900 through the summer of 1901. Together they created a great treasury of Haida oral literature in written form.
Having worke …
The Solid Form of Language
"Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough." With this concise and broadly informative essay, renowned poet, typographer and linguist Robert Bringhurst presents a brief history of writing and a new way of classifying and understandin …
The Tree of Meaning
The Tree of Meaning is a collection of thirteen lectures given by internationally-renowned poet, linguist and typographer Robert Bringhurst. Together these lectures present a superbly grounded approach to the study of language, focusing on storytelling, mythology, comparative literature, humanity and the breadth of oral culture. Bringhurst’s comm …
The Typographic Mind
An essay on thinking typographically. Includes references to architecture, design, language and poetry.
Thinking and Singing
Investigations into the role and importance of poetry in the culture of the mind and consciousness by some of our foremost practitioners of the art. Tim Lilburn and his interlocutors have been carrying on their "five-pointed conversation" about the relationship between poetry and philosophy for over a decade. The results of the moveable discussion …
This is What They Say
Dictated first in 1928 at Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, in the Chipewyan language, by FranÁois Mandeville, these stories were then transcribed by the Chinese linguist Li Fang-Kuei. They lay dormant in his notebooks for nearly half a century until they resurfaced in Taipei in 1976. Now, at last, Ron Scollon, pre-eminent linguist and one of the original …
Ursa Major
In March 2002, the Regina-based dance company New Dance Horizons performed Robert Bringhurst's Ursa Major: A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers & Dancers, a work that had been commissioned as part of an evening of modern performance and dance entitled Invisible Ceremonies. In Ursa Major, Bringhurst explores a polyphonic technique that allows multiple s …
