Over the course of a career spanning five decades, Canadian poet, novelist and playwright Earle Birney produced some of Canada’s best-known poems. The Essential Earle Birney contains a selection of his pivotal works, including early break-out successes; nuanced, mid-career lyrics; avant-garde experiments; and beautiful, deceptively simple love poetry. From ‘David’ to ‘Bushed’ to ‘Anglo-Saxon Street’, this indispensable collection reaffirms Birney’s position as a key figure in modern Canadian poetry. The Essential Poets Series presents the works of Canada’s most celebrated poets in a package that is beautiful, accessible, and affordable. The Essential Earle Birney is the 10th volume in the series.
This collection presents all of Earle Birney’s known published and unpublished writings on Trotsky and Trotskyism for the very first time. It includes their correspondence as well as a selection of Birney’s letters and literary writings. Before he became one of Canada’s most influential and popular twentieth century poets, Earle Birney lived a double life. To his students and colleagues, he was an engaging university lecturer and scholar. But for seven years—from 1933 to 1940—the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was the focus of his writing and much of his life. During his years as a Trotskyist in Canada, the United States and England, Birney wrote extensively about Trotsky, corresponded with him, organized Trotskyist cells in two countries, and recruited on behalf of Trotskyism; he also lectured on Trotsky and interviewed him over the course of several days. One of his two novels is based on some of these activities. The collection traces the origins of Trotsky’s mistrust of “the British” to his experiences in Canada; shows Birney’s influence on a major shift in Trotsky’s policy of “entrism” in British politics; includes the largest body of Trotskyist criticism in Canadian literary history; and demonstrates the need for a radical re-reading of Birney’s poetry in light of his Trotskyism.
Private Thomas Leadbeater Turvey is nobody’s idea of a capable recruit. Shifted from regimental pillar to post, Turvey tries and fails at every odd job in the army with a remarkable genius for mishap. A casualty before he has a chance to see action, Turvey watches the maimed and dying return from the front; thus Earle Birney’s comic masterpiece becomes an unforgettable indictment of war. Turvey won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1949.
Over the course of a career spanning five decades, Canadian poet, novelist and playwright Earle Birney produced some of Canada’s best-known poems. The Essential Earle Birney contains a selection of his pivotal works, including early break-out successes; nuanced, mid-career lyrics; avant-garde experiments; and beautiful, deceptively simple love poetry. From ‘David’ to ‘Bushed’ to ‘Anglo-Saxon Street’, this indispensable collection reaffirms Birney’s position as a key figure in modern Canadian poetry. The Essential Poets Series presents the works of Canada’s most celebrated poets in a package that is beautiful, accessible, and affordable. The Essential Earle Birney is the 10th volume in the series.
Earle Birney (1904-1995), the father of modern Canadian poetry, was one of Canada's finest writers and the author of "David," arguably the most popular Canadian poem of all time. One Muddy Hand: Selected Poems features Birney's best work, spanning his entire writing career from 1926 to 1987. Born in Calgary, Birney grew up in different parts of Alberta before his family settled in Banff. In 1922 he enrolled at the University of British Columbia, where he received his BA in English. He earned his MA and PhD from the University of Toronto and also studied at Berkeley and the University of London. Birney's first and second volumes of poetry, David and Other Poems, and Now is Time, both won the Governor General's Award. In addition to publishing over twenty collections of poems over his lifetime, he published two novels, including Turvey--which won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 1949--several plays, three books of criticism and a memoir. Birney was a noted teacher of creative writing and literature, known for inspiring a generation of students to become writers, educators and scholars. He had a distinguished career at UBC, where he founded Canada's first creative writing department in 1963, and he was University of Toronto's first writer-in-residence in 1965. Using Birney's Ghost in the Wheels: Selected Poems as a guide, editor Sam Solecki chose the remainder of the poems. Here are Birney's most-loved poems, such as "David," "Bushed," "A walk in Kyoto," "The bear on the Delhi road," "El Greco: Espolio" and "For Wailan," a sequence of love poems that are among the best in the Canadian canon. The only Birney book of poems currently available, One Muddy Hand brings a canonical author's poetry back into print and will be an important addition to bookshelves everywhere.
Over the course of a career spanning five decades, Canadian poet, novelist and playwright Earle Birney produced some of Canada’s best-known poems. The Essential Earle Birney contains a selection of his pivotal works, including early break-out successes; nuanced, mid-career lyrics; avant-garde experiments; and beautiful, deceptively simple love poetry. From ‘David’ to ‘Bushed’ to ‘Anglo-Saxon Street’, this indispensable collection reaffirms Birney’s position as a key figure in modern Canadian poetry. The Essential Poets Series presents the works of Canada’s most celebrated poets in a package that is beautiful, accessible, and affordable. The Essential Earle Birney is the 10th volume in the series.
