Spanning Gwendolyn MacEwen's career from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, this is a comprehensive collection of work by one of the greatest women writers of the 20th century. It traces the trajectory of her verse and the development of her fiction and drama, and includes letters, paintings, and photographs from the oeuvre of this beloved Canadian poet.
Margaret Atwood presents a selection of poetry by Gwendolyn MacEwen, who first met Atwood in a Toronto coffee shop. MacEwen's poetry is by turns playful, extravagant, melancholy, daring and profound. Her work takes its inspiration from subjects as hard-hitting as the Hiroshima bombing and as humble as the peanut butter sandwich. It springs from a deep involvement with self and world.
There is no doubt Rosemary Sullivan is a biographer of extraordinary talent. Her first biography, By Heart: Elizabeth Smart: A Life was a bestseller and nominated for a Governor General’s Award. Her third biography, The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out, was also a highly acclaimed national bestseller. And her second, Shadow Maker, won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction, the Canadian Authors Association Award for Non-Fiction, the City of Toronto Book Award and the University of British Columbia Medal for Canadian Biography. Now part of the PerennialCanada library, Shadow Maker reveals the many faces of Gwendolyn MacEwen, the magical and mesmerizing Canadian poet who died suddenly at the age of 46.
The fifty essays in Second Words span the period from 1962 to 1980 and reveal Margaret Atwood's views on feminism, Canadian literature, the creative process, nationalism, sexism, as well as critical commentary on such writers as Erica Jong, E. L. Doctorow, Northrop Frye, Roch Carrier, Marie-Claire Blais, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and many more.
Her poetry is both groundbreaking and unforgettable. Now you can enjoy the powerful first works of this poet in The Poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen, Volume One: The Early Years. These poems show the beginnings of a poetic style that inspired other poets and amazed readers for years. Her poetic voice is in turns playful, melancholy and daring; this is a must-read for all fans of MacEwen and poetry lovers that want an introduction to this important writer.
"MacEwen described what she set out to achieve as a "sort of powerful poetic mad half-abandoned prose somewhere between [Kenneth] Patchen and Virginia Woolf." Set in a medieval past that has distinctly modern overtones, the novel is about Julian, a young man who believes he is Christ. Wandering the countryside in a horse-drawn wagon, Julian learns "to suspend logic like a whale on a thread." He becomes a master of alchemy, performing "miracles" like curing the mad and changing water into wine. When his rapt audiences begin to lose faith, Julian must pay with his life. MacEwen skillfully implies a relationship between alchemy, miracles and belief, and the art forms she is engaged in herself, poetry and prose. What is the price the writer-magician must pay to engender belief in her audience? Is something true merely because we believe it? With an afterword by the author's sister."--Jacket
The Insomniac Library is proud to reissue Gwendolyn MacEwen's second novel, more than thirty years after its original appearance in 1971. The novel bears important resemblances to MacEwen's earlier Julian the Magician. Writing to poet Al Purdy, MacEwen confessed she wanted her second novel to be ''bulky, readable, and not overly mysterious.'' Unlike in Julian, however, here MacEwen sets out to write a deeply serious novel that also functions as entertaining historical fiction. The novel's hero is Akhenaton, Pharaoh of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty, who was the first ruler to introduce the idea of monotheism. As Rosemary Sullivan remarks in her biography of MacEwen, he was, like Julian, ''one more human being filled with the god-lust.'' Akhenaton's single-mindedness in his quest for his own brand of reason is a powerfully paradoxical distillation of the artistic temperament: originality, fertility and beauty set against death and despair and an inability to love.
