Gathering the strongest poetry published by Newfoundlanders since the death of E.J. Pratt in 1964, The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry features selections from twelve of the province's most impressive poets, including Al Pittman, Tom Dawe, Mary Dalton, John Steffler, Patrick Warner, and Ken Babstock. This groundbreaking anthology, with over forty years of poetry on display, celebrates the rousing and the rebirth of contemporary Newfoundland verse. - 20130114
The Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador is a mythologized place that resonates with tragic adventure, polar expeditions and Grand Banks fishing; a real and imagined geography with an incredible artistic output that calls for critical discussion. This book examines the diversity of this province’s literature and culture, taking into consideration the expertise of scholars and writers who have first-hand knowledge of its unique context. Chapters on history, travel, fiction, autobiography, poetry, theatre, storytelling, filmmaking, and the visual arts provide an up-to-date survey across a broad range of artistic endeavours, as well as close readings of selected texts. The questions that fill the pages of Pathways of Creativity in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador arise from the awareness its contributors have of historically shared experiences, but also of shared delusions, and their essays provoke contemplation beyond the labels local/global, Newfoundlander/Come-From-Away. Aboriginal histories and writing come to the foreground in this panoramic view that balances descriptions of mainstream, vernacular and Indigenous cultural productions. The final chapter is organized as a multi-voiced interview which serves as a supplement to the academic essays. Here, themes are revisited and personalized as several writers express their feelings about what it means to be a Newfoundlander and an artist. As such, this book will encourage dialogue about Newfoundland and Labrador’s literary and artistic achievements within the international community of readers and researchers.
The Newfoundland Poetry Series was begun in 1993 as Breakwater's twentieth anniversary project to honour and preserve the literary talents of our Newfoundland and Labrador poets. Selection is based on quality. Breakwater's aim is to make the series affordable to as many lovers of poetry as possible.
Robert Lecker explores the ways in which these anthologies contributed to the formation of a Canadian literary canon, the extent to which this canon was tied to an ideal of English-Canadian nationalism, and the material conditions accounting for the anthologies' production.
Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry • Longlisted for the 2023 E.J. Pratt Family Poetry Award A CBC Best Canadian Poetry Book of 2021 Drawing on Arthurian myth, the Romantic poets, the ill-fated "Great War" efforts of the Newfoundland Regiment, modern parenthood, 16-bit video games, and Major League Baseball, these poems examine the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, both as individuals and as communities, in order to explain how and why we are the way we are. At its heart, Romantic interrogates our western society's idealized, self-deluding personal and cultural perspectives.
A biography of one of Canada's leading poets. Traces Acorn's roots in Prince Edward Island and shows that family, landscape, and the troubled shades of postcolonial society were continuous spurs to his creative life. Connects his self-perpetuated image as a working-class rebel, and his peculiar brand of communism, to his employment history and experience of war. His troubled relationships with family and friends, and his ill health, are explored as sources both of pain and inspiration. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Gift Horse, Mark Callanan's second full-length collection of poetry, was largely written following a near-fatal medical emergency in 2007. The poems offer up the story of a young man whose gratitude at being alive is undercut by Lazarus-like confusion and ambivalence. Brandishing a newly acute sense of mortality, Callanan emerges as an Atlantic flâneur stalked by terrifying sea legends, death-steeped domesticity (where even supermarket lobsters "weigh in against oblivion") and the extinct Newfoundland Wolf. Understated, sinister and unsettling, Gift Horse is a work of considerable craft and vision.
