But never underestimate the powers of the pawn who can promote into a queen and put a kingdom on,

or moving humbly up the board, killing on the side, outpriest the priest, and leave the knight without a horse to ride,

and trip the elevated rook to bring it crashing down, and nudge the misanthropic queen into oblivion,

and stop before great Caesar's throne, a tiny regicide, and watch a cornered monarch fall, and ponder how he died.

--from The Powers of the Pawn

David Solway is the author of many books of poetry including the award-winning Modern Marriage, Bedrock, Chess Pieces, Saracen Island: The Poetry of Andreas Karavis and The Lover's Progress: Poems after William Hogarth, the latter illustrated by Marion Wagschal and adapted for the stage by Curtain Razors. His work has been anthologized in The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, McClelland and Stewart's New Canadian Poetry, Border Lines: Contemporary Poetry in English from Copp Clark, and The Bedford Introduction to Literature from St. Martin's Press. Among his publications, Education Lost won the QSPELL Prize for Nonfiction and Random Walks was a finalist for Le Grand Prix du Livre de Montr?al, while his poetry collection Franklin's Passage won the prize. Solway publishes regularly in such journals as The Atlantic Monthly and Canadian Notes & Queries, and is an occasional contributor to the book pages of the National Post. His more specialized writings have appeared in the International Journal of Applied Semiotics, Policy Options: Institute on Research in Public Policy, and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. Solway recently completed a new collection of poems entitled The Properties of Things and in the past three years has published two political books, The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism and Identity and Hear, O Israel!. David Solway writes regularly for FrontPage Magazine and Pajamas Media, and is a contributing editor for The Metropolitan and Arts & Opinion.

David Solway's profile page

"These poems play games with the world, or they appear to. Perhaps the world is playing its own kind of joke on us through the genial agency of David Solway's Chess Pieces. One might mistake this enterprise for a manual for poetical grand masters - did these poems not so precisely mimic the games our lives play, and so tearfully evoke the dreadful stakes we play for. They are true poems, and their play releases powerful forces." Peter Davison, poetry editor for The Atlantic Monthly.
"I have enjoyed David Solway's poems for decades, and am glad to see a new collection; glad, too, to find that these Chess Pieces are wholly accessible to one whose grasp of the game is primitive. Here, as always, Solway writes with a Gravesian dash and brio, taking (and giving) pleasure in a fine vocabulary, a gift for surprising figures, and a striking breadth of reference." Richard Wilbur.
"I've long wanted to learn just enough chess to call myself, accurately, a patzer. Now I have another reason: in order to appreciate more fully David Solway's grand-masterful poems. For the nonce, I'm content to admire Chess Pieces simply for its art, , which is (to steal one of Solway's lapidary lines) "towering, valorous, cardinal, majestic." Ben Downing, Managing Editor of Parnassus.