OTHER BOOKS

That was quite a plug I gave for Barbara Pelman, something I wasn't consciously setting out to do when I started that post. Obviously, I was genuinely impressed by both her poetry and her teaching ideas. By the way, I revised and expanded on the post just now...

Whenever I go to TO, I pick up a slew of books because the book stores there, of course, are so much better than the English language bookstores in Montreal.

At the LCP AGM, besides Pelman's One Stone, I also picked up (all Canadian poets of course):

Ray Hsu's Anthropy (this year's winner of the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry -- funny, Pelman's book wasn't even nominated). This promises to be another "poet find". Hsu blends prose poems and poetry in an arresting way, reminding me a little Tony Tost...
George Elliott Clarke, Quebecite (with accent aigu's over all the e's -- looks funny to me without)
Carolyn Marie Souaid's Swimming into the Light
Wendy Morton's Undercover
and fresh off the press,
In Fine Form, The Canadian Book of Form Poetry an anthology which makes a good companion for The Making of a Poem: The Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms edited by Mark Strand -- it's the same idea, except that all the poems are by Canadians and actually more forms are described and exemplified than in the Norton volume (which is really not as exhaustive as Norton Anthologies usually are). Forms in the Canadian book that are not in the Norton include the Fugue, Madrigal, Ghazal, Glosa, Haiku and other Japanese forms, Incantation, Palindrome, Rondeau, Syllabics, Triolet, Tercet.

From a couple of used bookstores,

Phyllis Webb, The Vision Tree: Selected Poems
Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems (Penguin edition) and Poems of Akhamatova, trans. by Stanly Kunitz & Max Haward (the two books sold for so little I bought them both)
The New Canadian Poets 1970 - 85 edited by Dennis Lee

New I bought:
John Berryman, The Dream Songs + His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (in one volume)
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems (this one with exerpts from his notebooks and letters -- I think it's the third time I've aquired this volume... I keep losing them to absent minded friends!)
Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God (Certainly I could have bought this one in Mtl, but it was there, in front of me... I almost bought a volume by Charles Bernstein, but she won the "battle of the books" that day!)

Sold very cheaply to to me by a friend were:
Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ
Albert Schweitzer, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization (how weighty a title for a book of 90 pages!)
Robert Bly, American Poetry: Wildness & Domesticity

purchased at its booklaunch, in a gorgeous hand-stitched and illustrated edition

Allan Briesmaster, Galactic Music

and "borrowed" from my parents' bookshelf,

Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

As you can imagine, on the train trip back my suitcase weighed a ton. Quite a lot of *stone* there ...