This is the fourth edition of Gary Geddes' highly successful anthology of Canadian poetry. All of the poets included in the previous editions have been retained, although their selections have been carefully reconsidered. Among new poets added to this edition are Anne Carson, Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt, and Fred Wah.
* denotes new poets
new selections are bolded
E.J. Pratt
Newfoundland
The Shark
Sea-gulls
Erosion
The Man and the Machine
From Stone to Steel
Newfoundland Seamen
From the Titanic (excerpt, not the full poem)
Dorothy Livesay
Fire and Reason
Going to Sleep
Spain
Comrade
From Call My People Home (excerpt)
The Unquiet Bed
The Three Emilys
Picasso, Sketching
Bartok and the Geranium
Without Benefit of Tape
Sorcery
Ralph Gustafson
'S.S.R., Lost at Sea.' The Times
Now at the Ocean's Verge
The Newspaper
Wednesday at North Hatley
In the Yukon
I Think of All Soft Limbs
Ramble on What in the World Why
The Sun in the Garden
The Arrival of Wisdom
At the Cafe at Night
State of Affairs
Saint Lawrence Roasted on One Side Asked to be Turned Over
A.M. Klein
Heirloom
Autobiographical
For the Sisters of the Hotel Dieu
Political Meeting
Montreal
Lone Bather
Portrait of the Poet as Landscape
Earle Birney
From the Hazel Bough
Anglosaxon Street
David
Bushed
Appeal to a Lady with a Diaper
A Walk in Kyoto
The Bear on the Delhi Road
Al Purdy
Home-made Beer
The Country North of Belleville
The Cariboo Horses
Wilderness Gothic
Arctic Rhododrendrons
Lament for the Dorsets
The Runners
A Handful of Earth
Moonspell
Miriam Waddington
Girls
At Midnight
My Lessons in the Jail
On My Birthday
The Mile Runner
Ukranian Church
Gossip
The Survivors
How I Spent the Year Listening to the Ten O'Clock News
Ten Years and More
Lately I've Been Feeling Very Jewish
F.R. Scott
Lakeshore
Old Song
Laurentian Shield
Overture
Charity
W.L.M.K.
The Canadian Authors Meet
Saturday Sundae
Martinigram
A Lass in Wonderland
Bonne Entente
For Bryan Priestman
Irving Layton
Look, the Lambs Are All Around Us!
The Cold Green Element
The Fertile Muck
On Seeing the Statuettes of Ezekiel and Jeremiah in the Church of Notre Dame
Whatever Else Poetry Is Freedom
Berry Picking
Keine Lazarovitch 1870-1959
A Tall Man Executes a Jig
P.K. Page
The Stenographers
Landlady
Stories of Snow
Photos of a Salt Mine
The Permanent Tourists
Arras
After Rain
Brazilian Fazenda
Evening Dance of the Grey Flies
Planet Earth
Raymond Souster
Young Girls
Lagoons, Hanlan's Point
Downtown Corner News Stand
Study: The Bath
Flight of the Roller-Coaster
All This Slow Afternoon
The Six-Quart Basket
The Death of the Grenadiers
A Morning in Brussels
Night Raider
Graveyard Shift
Somalia
Phyllis Webb
Love Story
Sitting
A Tall Tale
To Friends who Have Also Considered Suicide
Poetics Against the Angel of Death
Rilke
Eschatology of Spring
Prison Report
Treblinka Gas Chamber
Seeking Shape. Seeking Meaning
Cornflowers and Saffron Robes Belittle the Effort
You Have My Approval
Leonard Cohen
Elegy
Story
I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries
You Have the Lovers
As the Mist Leaves No Scar
Now of Sleeping
The Genius
Style
The Music Crept by Us
God Is Alive
How to Speak Poetry
D.G. Jones
Portrait of Anne Hebert
Beautiful Creatures Brief as These
For Francoise Adnet
These Trees Are No Forest of Mourners
Summer Is a Poem by Ovid
The Stream Exposed With All Its Stones
Words from the Aviary
Stumblesong
The Ship as Navigator
Covering Letter
Alden Nowlan
Beginning
Warren Pryor
God Sour the Milk of the Knacking Wench
For Nicholas of All the Russians
And He Wept Aloud, So That the Egyptians Heard It
Britain Street
July
The Mysterious Naked Man
For Claudine Because I Love Her
Ypres: 1915
The Broadcaster's Poem
Eli Mandel
Thief Hanging in Baptist Halls
The Meaning of the I CHING
Houdini
Pictures in an Institution
From the North Saskatchewan
On the 25 Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz: Memorial Services, Toronto, YMHA, Bloor and Spadina, January 25, 1970
Margaret Avison
Snow
The World Still Needs
To Professor X, Year Y
Thw Swimmer's Moment
Voluptuaries and Others
Pace
Black-White Under Green: May 18, 1965
July Man
In A Season of Unemployment
Oughtiness Ousted
We the Poor Who Are Always With Us
Word: Russets
Gwendolyn MacEwen
Poems in Braille
Manzini: Escape Artist
Poem Improvised Around A First Line
The Red Bird You Wait For
The Discovery
Dark Pines Under Water
Memoirs of a Mad Cook
The Child Dancing
Apologies
Nitroglycerien Tulips
Deraa
Ghazala's Foal
Tall Tales
Notes from the Dead Land
John Newlove
Then, If I Cease Desiring
Crazy Riel
Verigin, Moving In Alone
Ride Off Any Horizon
The Pride
Such Fun, Such Fun
*Robin Blaser
From Cups
So
The Medium
Winter Words
The Finder
Tumble-Weed
The Truth Is Laughter 14
Dreams, April, 1981
graffito
The Iceberg
Home for Boys and Girls
Image-Nation 21 (territory)
For Barry Clinton, d. 17, June, 1984, of aids
Praise to Them, December 30, 1984
Of the Land of Culture
George Bowering
Grandfather
Dobbin
Summer Solstice
Bones Along Her Body
From Kerrisdale Elegies, One
Death
Musing on Some Poets
Fall 1983, Oliver
*Fred Wah
My Horse
The Canoe, Too
From Pictograms from the Interior of B.C.
I'm Going to Keep on Dancing for the Rest of My Life
from Waiting for Saskatchewan
Elite 2
Elite 3
Elite 4
Father/Mother Haibun #4
Father/Mother Haibun #11
Father/Mother Haibun #17
Father/Mother Haibun #19
The Poem Called Syntax
From 'Music at the Heart of Thinking'
Margaret Atwood
The Animals in That Country
A Night in the Royal Ontario Museum
Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer
Death of a Young Son by Drowning
Game After Supper
They Eat Out
Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written
A Women's Issue
Morning in the Burned House
Patrick Lane
Passing into Storm
The Bird
Elephants
Mountain Oysters
Unborn Things
The Carpenter
Stigmata
Albino Pheasants
Winter
Fathers and Sons
The Bathroom
*bpNichol*R
Blues
From 'The Captain Poetry Poems'
Allegory #6
What is Can Lit?
Landscape: I
The Mouth
old mothers
for Caspar
St. Anzas VII
Monotones XXVII
sometimes I hear music
You Too, Nicky
Michael Ondaatje
Early Morning, Kingston to Ganonoque
Elizabeth
'The gate in his head'
From the Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Letters and Other Worlds
The Cinnamon Peeler
Escarpment
Last Ink
Pat Lowther.
Wanting
Touch Home
Two Babies in Two Years
Coast Range
Octopus
Hotline to the Gulf
Regard to Neruda
The Dig
*Daphne Marlatt
Imagine: A Town
A by-channel; a small backwater
Vacant, Lots
listen
feeding the pigeons
Healing
Two women in a birth
booking passage
Gary Geddes
Sandra Lee Scheuer
Letter of the Master of Horse
The Strap
Jimmy's Place
Saskatchewan: 1949
Philip Larkin
Robert Bringhurst
The Beauty of the Weapons
Anecdote of the Squid
The Stonecutter's Horses
These Poems, She Said
Poem Without Voices
For the Bones of Josef Mengele, Disinterred June 1985
*Don McKay
The Great Blue Heron
Fridge Nocturne
Adagio for a Fallen Sparrow
Waking at the Mouth of the Willow River
Early Instruments
Stretto
Nocturnal Migrants
Wings of Song
Winter Solstice Moon: An Eclogue
Anne Szumigalski
Victim
Girl with a Basket
Fishhawks
The Lullaby
The Arrangement
Shrapnel
Third Trimester
Halinka
Robert Kroetsch
Poem of Albert Johnson
Meditation on Tom Thomson
Seed Catalogue
*Lorna Crozier
A Brief History of the Horse
Inventing the Hawk
Small Resurrections
Joe Lawson's Wife
Packing for the Future: Instructions
Watching My Lover
A Kind of Love
*Roo Borson
Talk
Waterfront
Flowers
A Sad Device
Spring
Beauty
Intermittent Rain
City Lights
Summer Cloud
George Bowering
Water Memory
Whuff
*Dionne Brand
Hard Against the Soul/I
Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater
No Language is Neutral
Robyn Sarah
Fugue
Maintenance
A Mediation Between Claims
Study in Latex Semi-Gloss
Scratch
Passages
On Closing the Apartment of My Grandparents of Blessed Memory
The Cup Half Empty
*Erin Moure
Post-Modern Literature
Divergences
Being Carpenter
Toxicity
Miss Chatelaine
The Cooking
For Mitterand's Life, For My Life, For Yours
Grief
*Sharon Thesen
The Landlord's Tiger Lilies
Elegy, the Fertility Specialist
September, Turning, the Long Road Down to Love
Animals
Afternoon With Liver
Valentine
Upon the Fake Mesa
A Really Delicious Meal at Montri's
*Patrick Friesen
an audience with the dalai lama or, the old-fashioned pas de deux
From Anna
a woman from jamaica
ellice avenue
what's the story natalya
the man who licked stones
Bronwen Wallace
The Woman in This Poem
A Simple Poem for Virginia Woolf
The Heroes You Had As a Girl
Common Magic
Thinking With the Heart
*Tim Lilburn
Names of God
Pumpkins
Touching An Elephant in A Dark Room
In the Hills, Watching
Learning a Deeper Courtesy of the Eye
How To Be Here?
Everything is Proportion
*Jan Zwicky*R
High Summer
Your Body
Open Strings
Bill Evans: 'Here's That Rainy Day'
The Geology of Norway
Border Station
Poppies
Passing Sangudo
*Anne Carson
The Glass Essay
*Louise Bernice Halfe
Wagon Ride
Body Politics
Lizard's Curse
Hamilton's Graveyard
Picking Leftovers
So Sorry
From Blue Marrow