Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry • Longlisted for the 2023 E.J. Pratt Family Poetry Award

A CBC Best Canadian Poetry Book of 2021

Drawing on Arthurian myth, the Romantic poets, the ill-fated "Great War" efforts of the Newfoundland Regiment, modern parenthood, 16-bit video games, and Major League Baseball, these poems examine the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, both as individuals and as communities, in order to explain how and why we are the way we are. At its heart, Romantic interrogates our western society's idealized, self-deluding personal and cultural perspectives.

Mark Callanan is the author of Scarecrow [Killick Press, 2003], critically-acclaimed first book of poems, and Sea Legend [Frog Hollow Press, 2010], winner of the bpNichol Chapbook Award. His poetry has appeared in several anthologies, including Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Mark Callanan's profile page

• Long-listed, E.J. Pratt Family Poetry Award

Praise for Romantic

"Repeatedly, Callanan sets out a premise, builds and enriches it, and then gives it a neat, often surprising, but apt, twist."—Joan Sullivan, The Telegram

Praise for Mark Callanan

“Callanan has talent to burn, whether producing his seascapes or nature studies or human-subject poems. His eye is exact, his discipline imagist.”—George Elliott Clarke

“Breathtaking, such mastery … It’s all there: the imagery, the concise language, the musicality, the wit as well as the lyric evocation of transience, the fragility of love, the inevitability of loss. ‘I’m not the one in charge of metaphor,’ Callanan writes in ‘Divination,’ a wonderfully paradoxical line. It seems to me he is a diviner who has mastered metaphor and much else besides.”—Ruth Roach Pierson

“Mark Callanan’s voice is distinctive and confident, funny, grave, occasionally visionary, and his technical gifts are multifold. He is able to give old tropes a new currency and delivers his subjects with convincing urgency.”—Zachariah Wells

“It’s rare to encounter a poet who can weave economics, wildlife preservation, public policy, personal and civic history, epidemiology and gastronomy together into the tapestry of metaphor using such deceptively simple language.”—Michael Lista