***CANADA BOOK AWARD WINNER***

***2020 RELIT AWARDS: LONG SHORTLIST***

For almost fifty years, Tom Dawe has stood as one of the most respected and admired poets in Newfoundland. This definitive, necessary collection spans five decades of poetic achievement, reprinting each of Dawe’s published collections while gathering previously uncollected poems along with a stunning body of new work. This volume stands as a testament to a monumental achievement for readers both at home and abroad.

Tom Dawe has been a high-school teacher, English professor, visual artist, editor, writer, and poet. He has published seventeen volumes of work, which include poetry, folklore, and children’s literature. His latest works include Where Genesis Begins (Breakwater, 2009), winner of the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award, and Moocher in the Lun (Flanker Press, 2010), winner of the 2010 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards–Bruneau Family Children’s/Young Adult Literature Award.In the 1970s, during the “Newfoundland Renaissance,” he was one of the founders of Breakwater Books, a founding editor of TickleAce, and prose editor of the Livyere, a folklore journal. In 2002, Martina Seifert’s comprehensive study, Rewriting Newfoundland Mythology: The Works of Tom Dawe, was published in Germany and in Cambridge, MA.Tom Dawe is the recipient of many awards and honours. In 2007, he was awarded a lifetime membership for the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador and was elected to the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council Hall of Honour. In 2010, he was named St. John’s Poet Laureate. In 2012, he was named a member to the Order of Canada and also to the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Tom Dawe's profile page

• Short-listed, The Relit Award
• Winner, Canada Book Award

"In 'Grand Canyon,' from his 2019 collection Pilgrim, Tom Dawe recalls Don Marquis, who 'once said / that publishing a book of poetry / is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon / and waiting for the echo" (55). If this is the case then Dawe's recent New and Collected Poems is a bouquet of fallen petals that reminds readers, as it reminds the poet, ' how wonderful the canyon can be' (55)... Dawe's eye for detail is perhaps at its sharpest when focused on the relationship between the human and an ecological world that, while at times threatened by encroachment, also demonstrates both resilience and a fundamental indifference to human suffering... At over 350 pages in length, the collection testifies to a poet with a varied imagination who, over the course of a long career, has written eloquently about topics ranging from fairy tales and folklore to literature and politics. However, when read as a whole, it is the provocative, stark, and sometimes severe environmental poems that seem to best define Dawe's oeuvre. While the bulk of these poems are not new, they are certainly prescient in an era of environmental crisis. Indeed, that is what makes New and Collected Poems an important contribution to Newfoundland, and Canadian, environmental writing."

Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, 34, 2 (2019)

"The value of Dawe’s work lies in how it navigates such shifting identities not by ignoring or romanticizing the past but by looking on it with a tender and necessarily critical eye. His poems may be set firmly in Newfoundland, but they often marshal the timeless, placeless sense of folk tales and in this way achieve universal reach."

The Walrus