I'm happy to do so. It seems we don't really celebrate our own war poets. Everything seems to begin and end with John McCrae - and even then we don't look beyond 'In Flanders Fields'. I look to Frank Prewett, the finest of the lot, who was celebrated by many English poets, including Robert Graves (editor of his collected poems), yet it wasn't until 1987 that his first and only Canadian collection was published.
A writer, ghostwriter, écrivain public, literary historian and bibliophile, I'm the author of Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit (Knopf, 2003), and A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Translator, Memoirist and Pornographer (McGill-Queen's UP, 2011; shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize). I've edited over a dozen books, including The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco (Véhicule, 2013) and George Fetherling's The Writing Life: Journals 1975-2005 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2013). I currently serve as series editor for Ricochet Books and am a contributing editor for Canadian Notes & Queries. My most recent book is The Dusty Bookcase (Biblioasis, 2017), a collection of revised and expanded reviews first published here and elsewhere.
What a great find. In it's way, that's a darker poem than Dulce et decorum est. Thanks for sharing it.
ReplyDeleteI'm happy to do so. It seems we don't really celebrate our own war poets. Everything seems to begin and end with John McCrae - and even then we don't look beyond 'In Flanders Fields'. I look to Frank Prewett, the finest of the lot, who was celebrated by many English poets, including Robert Graves (editor of his collected poems), yet it wasn't until 1987 that his first and only Canadian collection was published.
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