Private Charles Smith had been dead for close to a century when Jonathan Hart discovered the soldier’s small diary in the Baldwin Collection at the Toronto Public Library. The diary’s first entry was marked 28 June 1915. After some research, Hart discovered that Charles Smith was an Anglo-Canadian, born in Kent, and that this diary was almost all that remained of this forgotten man, who lik…
In the often shadowy and grim world depicted in this collection, themes of class, poverty, violence, and family are developed. Together they form a critique of social mores and illuminate the difficult lives of the subaltern in Odisha society. The work of these authors contributes to an ongoing dialogue concerning the challenges, hardships, joys, and successes experienced by women around the wo…
In this inventive collection of poems, McCutcheon engages in sophisticated literary play and deploys the Surrealist practices of juxtaposition, cut-up, and defamiliarization. Moving from eroticism to the macabre and from transformative quotation to the individual idiom, Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them explores intertextuality in poetry by challenging the cultural tradition of seeing quotation …
One of Poland’s best-known poets, Ewa Lipska is today a major figure in European literature. In their translation of Sefer, Lipska’s first novel, translators Barbara Bogoczek and Tony Howard deftly capture the poet’s unmistakable voice—cool and precise, gently ironic, and deeply humane.
Prompted by renowned poet E.D. Blodgett’s deep love for and intimate experience of Prague, Praha is a poetic homage to the legendary city’s vital spirit. As they build on one another, the poems in the collection lift the reader over the threshold of purely mythic understanding and into the heart of one of Europe’s loveliest and most venerable cities. Each poem is accompanied by a translat…
Most of the short lyrics that make up this sublime collection were written first in English and French before being translated into Cree, Michif, Chinese, and Ukrainian to reflect Edmonton’s multicultural past and present. Together they form a composite view of the people and culture that inhabit the city’s natural spaces.
Fletcher was a voracious reader of works in many languages and although he was oriented toward Britain, his writing notably reflects a gaze fixed on a horizon much further away. His work therefore stands in contrast to the tendency of later Canadian writers, who focus inward on the nation, and on issues of Canadian identity. His work as a surveyor allowed him to travel across the country, obser…
Musing is a book of sonnets. Working within the framework of a classic poetic form, Jonathan Locke Hart embarks on an extended meditation on our rootedness in landscape and in the past. As sonnets, the poems are a mixture of tradition and innovation. Throughout, Hart deftly interweaves European culture with North American settings and experience. The collection opens with a foreword by noted li…
It is chiefly through the translations of Rossetti and Pound that English-speaking readers have encountered Cavalcanti’s work. Pound’s famous translation, now viewed by some as antiquated, is remarkably different from the translation provided here in the graceful voice of poet David Slavitt. Working under the significant restraints of Cavalcanti’s elaborate formal structures, Slavitt rend…
Born to a French-Canadian mother and Algerian father, Ouanessa Younsi is a bold and unique voice in modern Francophone poetry. In this intensely personal recitation on identity and ethnicity, Younsi takes the reader on a surreal odyssey through a liminal world of belonging and unbelonging, absence and presence, mind and body. Her visionary work, first published in French and translated here by …