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list price: $16.95
edition:Paperback
category: Poetry
published: Mar 2005
ISBN:9780889225145
publisher: Talonbooks

Back to the War

by Frank Davey

tagged: canadian
Description

More than 30 years in the making, Frank Davey’s careful archaeology of the catalogue of innocence his youthful imagination assembled growing up in and immediately after World War II is a work of astonishment.
This is no lyrical work of sentimental nostalgia, no attempt to return to a romanticized “simpler past,” no rediscovery of “the child within,” but rather a careful reconstruction of “the child without.” The reader moves through these poems, neither sanitized nor updated by their passage through experience, as one would through a gallery installation of intensely personal epiphanies, both frightening and ecstatic, lucid and obscure. They are stripped of any cultural preconception, a Blakean vision of the good and evil men and women do as they engage the other in a world at war—a world where the war is always somewhere else, but where the enemy, unseen, is everywhere present in the invented surrogates of combat.

About the Author

Frank Davey has been a poet, editor, small-magazine publisher, literary critic, and cultural critic in Canada since 1961. He is editor and co-founder of the influential poetry newsletter Tish (1961-63) and since 1965 editor of Open Letter, the Canadian journal of writing and theory. With Fred Wah in 1984, he founded SwiftCurrent, the world’s first online literary magazine, and operated it until 1990. His more than forty books include Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster (1980), The Abbotsford Guide to India (1986), Reading Canadian Reading (1988), Canadian Literary Power (1994), and Back to the War (2005).

Contributor Notes

Frank Davey
Born in Vancouver, Frank Davey attended the University of British Columbia, where he was a co-founder of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. Since 1963, he has been the editor-publisher of the poetics journal Open Letter. In addition, he co-founded the world’s first on-line literary magazine, SwiftCurrent, in 1984. Davey writes with a unique panache as he examines with humour and irony the ambiguous play of signs in contemporary culture, the popular stories that lie behind it and the struggles between different identity-based groups in our globalizing society—racial, regional, gender-based, ethnic, economic—that drive this play.

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