Inside the poem

How do you read a poem? This book, in a striking new approach to Canadian poetry, provides some annovative answers. Twenty-six critics - including Diana Brydon, Sandra Djwa, Laurie Ricou, Stephen Scobie, George Woodcock, and W.H. New - demonstrate ways to read individual poems by DionneBrand, Robert Bringhurst, Robert Kroetsch, Dorothy Livesay, Eli Mandel, Daphne Marlatt, Al Purdy, Phyllis Webb, and many others.The book includes the texts of such famous Canadian poems as Earle Birney's David, Margaret Atwood's Notes Towards a Poem that Can Never Be Written, A.M. Klein's Portrait of the Poet as Landscape, Irving Layton's Whatever Else Poetry Is Freedom, Archibald Lampman's The City of the End of Things,and A.J.M. Smith's The Lonely Land. Discussions of these and other works show how to read a poem for its political implications, how to place a poem in its social and historical contexts, how to examine the language and form of poetry, and how to consider a poem's ideas.Twenty-eight new poems - by some of Canada's leading contemporary writers, among them Lorna Crozier, Gary Geddes, Ralph Gustafson, Patrick Lane, Daniel David Moses, Erin Moure, P.K. Page, and Fred Wah - add to the volume's richness and its fascination.