The Collected Poems Of Miriam Waddington A Critical Edition

This anthology brings together, for the first time, the complete published works of Jewish Canadian poet Miriam Waddington and features a rare selection of previously unpublished poems.

Miriam Waddington's verse is deceptively accessible: it is personal but never private, emotional but not confessional, thoughtful but never cerebral. The subtlety of her craft is the hallmark of a modernist poet whose work opens to the world and its readers. She details intoxicating romance and mature love, the pleasures of marriage and motherhood, the experience of raising two sons to adulthood, and the ineffable pain of divorce. As she moved through life, she wrote clearly and uncompromisingly about the vast sweep of Canada, her travels to new lands, the passage of time, the death of her ex-husband, the loss of close friends and, later, of growing old.

As the sixties became the seventies, legendary interviewer Earle Toppings recorded sixteen emerging Canadian writers who would go on to become icons of CanLit. Presented here alongside critical notes and the recollections of Toppings himself, the transcripts of these recordings are a window on the early careers of Canada’s literary masters.

Gerald K. Stone has collected books about Canadian Jewry since the early 1980s. This volume is a descriptive catalog of his Judaica collection, comprising nearly 6,000 paper or electronic documentary resources in English, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Logically organized, indexed, and selectively annotated, the catalog is broad in scope, covering Jewish Canadian history, biography, religion, literature, the Holocaust, antisemitism, Israel and the Middle East, and more. An introduction by Richard Menkis discusses the significance of the Catalog and collecting for the study of the Jewish experience in Canada. An informative bibliographical resource, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Canadian and North American Jewish studies.

Throughout his career A.M. Klein struggled to define for himself the role of the poet in the contemporary world. Deeply rooted in the traditions of Judaism, and at the same time powerfully attracted by the freedom and scope of international modernism, he sought to reconcile past and present, community and creative individuality. Whether or not he finally achieved his own high aims, it was, in his own words, 'something merely to entertain them.' The result was a body of work immensely rich and varied in tone, language, cultural resonance. This collection of eighty-four poems offers a representative sampling of Klein's finest poetry, while taking into account the changing critical discourse of the last fifty years. Anyone interested in experiencing the full range of Klein's poetic achievement, or in understanding the complex nature of the poet, need look no further than this eminently readable volume.

This long, narrative poem, Radiant Shards: Hoda's North End Poems, traces the sacrifice and suffering of devoted but destitute parents, Russian immigrants who are acutely affected by the Depression and struggle relentlessly to survive in Winnipeg. More importantly, with its focus on the life experience and inner world of their tenacious daughter - and as the first poetic project to give voice to a Jewish sex worker, a figure that has been all but erased from literary history - Radiant Shards is a compassionate and humanizing work. The poem invokes Adele Wiseman's 1974 novel Crackpot, described by Jewish Studies scholars Ruth Wisse as a foundational twentieth-century literary text and by Josh Lambert as a radically feminist work. This book imagines the interior life of the novel's protagonist, an obese Jewish sex worker named Hoda, who services the boys and men of North End Winnipeg during the first half of the twentieth century. In Radiant Shards, Hoda reflects personally and knowingly on the experiences of her complicated life. Against the structural arc of novelistic events that shape her worldview, she plumbs the depths of her suffering and the triumph of her will from a poetically imagined position of maturity and self-awareness. This creative project also incorporates archival/historical photographs housed in the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada and the Archives of Manitoba. These images ground the poet's lyric presentation of Hoda and deepen the resonant voice of a character that originally was modelled on an actual North End resident.