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Poetry Canadian

The Shovel

by (author) Colin Browne

Publisher
Talonbooks
Initial publish date
Nov 2007
Category
Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780889225749
    Publish Date
    Nov 2007
    List Price
    $19.95

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Description

Everything Colin Browne has made up or invented in The Shovel seems written in prose; everything in it he has “unearthed”—from research, the stories of others and source texts—appears as poetry. In this extraordinary book, he has inverted the way we have been defining and privileging forms of language in English for the last century; self-expression becomes prosaic, the recording of history, poetic.

While The Shovel contains a range of styles and voices—everything from concrete poetry to “recollections of things past in tranquility” to delightfully humourous accounts of the poet’s accidental encounters with prominent philosophers—this book lives and sings through its epic passages. Ezra Pound defined the epic as “a poem containing history,” and in these necessary poems Browne is a restless prowler through history’s layers, sudden veerings and terrible, wonderful intersections. The Shovel is a book composed in wartime, an act of reckoning, a record of unkept anniversaries and possible histories (in texts devoted to the likes of Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Linton Garner). In exhuming the mesopelagic shades of the 20th century, The Shovel collapses, at last, the reigning fiction of time.

Every age demands a poetry to contain it, and here Colin Browne takes a measure of both the privileges and the appalling costs of service and citizenship, from colonial British Columbia to World War I Mesopotamia.

About the author

Clint Burnham is widely published as a critical theorist, poet, and author of books on digital culture. He is the author of book-length studies of Steve McCaffery and Fredric Jameson, a novel titled Smoke Show (2005), and several books of poetry, including The Benjamin Sonnets (2009). His most recent critical book is The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (2012). His most recent art writing includes a catalogue essay on Canadian photographer Kelly Wood; an essay on Edward Burtynsky is in the forthcoming Petrocultures collection from McGill-Queens. During a residency at the Urban Subjects Collective in Vienna in 2014–15, he wrote books on Slavoj Žižek and digital culture, and on Fredric Jameson and Wolf of Wall Street.Burnham is an associate member of the SFU Department of Geography and a member of SFU’s Centre for Global Political Economy. He is a founding member of the Vancouver Lacan Salon.

Colin Browne's profile page

Awards

  • Short-listed, ReLit Award for Poetry

Editorial Reviews

“The skill and intense ardor of the mind at work … is delightful.” — Fred Wah

The Shovel is a major work, confirmation of Colin Browne’s exacting artistry, his ability to bring such a wide range of materials into a single, epic (in the sense that Pound gave to that term), and devastatingly concentrated unity of purpose. One of those necessary books, it earns and deserves our closest attention.”
—Canadian Literature

“The epic sweep of pieces is impressive, at times rapturous. They are worth digging for.”
—Quill & Quire

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