The biggest surprise among this spring’s poetry books from McClelland and Stewart is that Tim Lilburn is finally hitting his stride—as a confessional poet. Lilburn has long been a religious nature poet in the tradition of Hopkins and Charles Wright, although never a particularly good one. His early poems have a wild linguistic energy that made them stand out from the plainspoken Canadian verse of the late…
James Pollock
James Pollock is the author of Sailing to Babylon (Able Muse Press, 2012), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry, and You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada (Porcupine’s Quill, 2012), a finalist for the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award for a collection of essays. He is also the editor of The Essential Daryl Hine (Porcupine’s Quill, 2015), which made Partisan’s list of the best books of 2015. He is a professor of English and creative writing at Loras College in Iowa and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Articles by
James Pollock
Choosing the Best Canadian Poetry
April 2009
Perhaps you have a copy of Margaret Atwood’s New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English on your bookshelf. (Go ahead, blow the dust off it: ah, there it is.) This last real attempt to formulate a canon of English-language Canadian poetry for the common reader was published three decades ago, in 1982. It is true that a handful of classroom anthologies have appeared since…