Civil Elegies And Other Poems

"A beautiful new edition of Civil Elegies, this is Dennis Lee's uncompromising exploration of citizenship, both Canadian and human. Eli Mandel has called Civil Elegies “one of the most important contemporary books of poetry in our country.”"

Civil Elegies is Dennis Lee's uncompromising exploration of citizenship, both Canadian and human. Eli Mandel has called Civil Elegies one of the most important contemporary books of poetry in our country. It was the inner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1972.

"You can almost hear the skipping rope slapping the sidewalk,” wrote Margaret Laurence of Dennis Lee’s timeless poetry collection Alligator Pie. One of the first illustrated books published about Canadian children and featuring Canadian place names, Alligator Pie established Dennis Lee’s reputation as “Canada’s Father Goose” and has sold more than half a million copies since its publication in 1974. This classic edition, featuring Frank Newfeld’s instantly recognizable original illustrations and book design, includes childhood favourites such as “Willoughby Wallaby Woo,” “Wiggle to the Laundromat” and “Skyscraper.”

This book is an exhilarating revelation. No other poet in Canada has the depth and range of Dennis Lee. Jazzman, jester, and metaphysician, hardball political thinker and passionate lover, he has been publishing poems for fifty years, working across the spectrum from nursery rhymes and skipping songs to uncompromising moral introspection to full-tilt love songs, plangent psalms, and ecstatic, solitary prayer. This Omnibus represents them all, and it will make your head spin. There are poets’ poets and people’s poets. And then there are those few who are neither and both: the few who become, over time, part of the warp and weft of their culture. Heart Residence collects for the first time work from all corners of this extraordinary career, from Lee’s searing early breakthroughs to his beloved children's verse to his visions of environmental apocalypse. A must-have collection from one of Canada’s literary icons.

Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies remains one of the most potent long poems devoted to the nature of Canadian identity. Lee wanted us to realize that the cadence of our speaking and reading is politically charged. However, the rational problems that he raised also drove him crazy. Civil Elegies stands as one of the most disturbed and manic poems about Canada ever written. Its narrator is completely falling apart. The Cadence of Civil Elegies marks the launch of the Cormorant monograph series, which brings unique perspectives to Canadian literary works from the country's leading academics, writers, and critical thinkers.

Dennis Lee's heart-stricken masterpiece reminds us why poetry still matters.

Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp.

Honored in "Best Books of the Year" listings from The New Yorker, National Public Radio, Library Journal, and The Huffington Post. "One With Others represents Wright's most audacious experiment yet."—The New Yorker "[A] book . . . that defies description and discovers a powerful mode of its own."— National Public Radio "[A] searing dissection of hate crimes and their malignant legacy."—Booklist Today, Gentle Reader, the sermon once again: "Segregation After Death." Showers in the a.m. The threat they say is moving from the east. The sheriff's club says Not now. Not nokindofhow. Not never. The children's minds say Never waver. Air fanned by a flock of hands in the old funeral home where the meetings were called [because Mrs. Oliver owned it free and clear], and that selfsame air, sanctified and doomed, rent with racism, and it percolates up from the soil itself . . . In this National Book Award finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, C.D. Wright returns to her native Arkansas and examines explosive incidents grounded in the Civil Rights Movement. In her signature style, Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, interviews, newspaper accounts, and personal memories—especially those of her incandescent mentor, Mrs. Vittitow—with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, and activists. This history leaps howling off the page. C.D. Wright has published over a dozen works of poetry and prose. Among her honors are the Griffin Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and lives outside of Providence, Rhode Island.