Reimagining Canadian Poetry

This book is long overdue. Canadian poetry, like Canada itself, has changed dramatically over the past half-century, but much remains to be done to give Canada’s post-colonial, revolutionary voices and its literary inventors their rightful place in anthologies, classrooms and the popular imagination. Writing in Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (1957–2003), by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy, is valuable both for its reimagining of CanLit as a place where such voices belong and for its rethinking of the avant-garde. Including nine essays by Butling and seven by Rudy, the book thoroughly documents the history of radical writing in English Canada and provides excellent introductions to the poetry of outstanding writers in that tradition, such as bp Nichol, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Robin Blaser, Fred Wah, Claire Harris, Erin Mouré, Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson and Rita Wong. Essays on individual writers are arranged historically to coordinate with...