Anachronicles, The
- Publisher
- Ronsdale Press
- Initial publish date
- Apr 2008
- Category
- Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781553800545
- Publish Date
- Apr 2008
- List Price
- $15.95
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Where to buy it
Recommended Age, Grade, and Reading Levels
- Age: 16
- Grade: 11
Description
The Anachronicles is a collection of unusually rich poems that are both proto- and post-colonial. The title itself - melding the two words "anachronism" and "chronicle" - points to how the poems explore events and exchanges in one place from two points in time.
About the author
Born in 1939 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, George McWhirter grew up on the Shankill Road. He attended Queen’s University in Belfast, where his classmates included Seamus Heaney, and later completed a Masters degree at the University of British Columbia. McWhirter lived in Spain from 1965 to 1966, when he moved to Canada where he taught high school in Port Alberni, making an abrupt transition from Barcelona to living in a log cabin by Sproat Lake. He is the author of twenty books, many of which have won major awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the MacMillan Prize for Poetry, the Canadian Chapbook Poetry Competition Winner, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the FR Scott Prize for Translation. In 2005, George McWhirter retired as a professor in the Creative Writing Department at UBC. In 2007 he was inaugurated as the first Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver.
Librarian Reviews
The Anachronicles
George McWhirter has invented a new verse form called an “anachronicle”. Instead of viewing the past from the present, his poetry explores events in one place from two points in time. In “Hops” McWhirter writes of a trans-Atlantic argument between the goddess Liadan and the poet Cuirithir. Using Shakespearean blank verse and striking imagery, McWhirter takes us on a comical journey through history.McWhirter, the first poet laureate of Vancouver, was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize 2008 for The Incorrection, and has won many other awards including the Ethel Wilson Prize for his short stories, and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (shared with Chinua Achebe, 1972).
Caution: Contains some sexual references.
Source: The Association of Book Publishers of BC. BC Books for BC Schools. 2008-2009.
