Description
Courageous poet, tireless critic, and leading anthologist of his time, Arthur James Marshall Smith is recognized as one of the most influential and vital forces in Canadian literature. Instrumental in both defining a Canadian tradition in poetry and in promoting the modernist movement in Canadian literature, Smith was a very public figure. This prominent writer, however, produced an impersonal, yet intensely private, intellectual poetry. In A.J.M. Smith: Canadian Metaphysical, Compton exposes 'the mind of A.J.M. Smith -- its range and development -- as revealed in [his] poetry.' Charting and evaluating the overall development of his work, Compton provides fresh insights into Smith's 'least discussed' poems.
About the author
Anne Compton
Is a two-time winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize and winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry for her second collection, Processional. In 2008, she was awarded the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English Language Literary Arts. A former teacher and writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick at Saint John, she developed and directed the acclaimed Lorenzo Reading Series.
"[Compton's] poems and prose-poems provoke and stimulate thinking about where the boundaries between experience, observation, perception, expression, and communication might lie."
— PN Review
"Her writing points to a persistent, saving grace, a lyric remainder — given 'the small manoeuvres left us now' — that can still find its way somehow into these moving, finely made poems.
— Event
