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list price: $21.95
edition:Paperback
category: Poetry
published: Jan 1995
ISBN:9781550171259
publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.

Breathing Fire

Canada's New Poets

edited by Patrick Lane & Lorna Crozier, foreword by Al Purdy

tagged: anthologies (multiple authors), canadian
Description

A new generation of Canadian poets has come of age!

In this volume, award-winning poets Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane present the work of 31 of the country's best young poets, including Michael Redhill, Karen Solie, Karen Connelly, Gregory Scofield, and Stephanie Bolster. "These are the writers who were born in the mid-1960s to 1970s," Crozier writes. "They are a large, precocious, ardent group of skilled and passionate writers, and they have a faith in the power of poetry to rekindle, redeem and renew. Without a doubt their poems are breathing fire."

Born in the sixties and seventies, these poets are the best of the new and the best of the young. They are the voices of the nineties, a decade that will bridge the millennium. Not since the early seventies when Al Purdy put together his Storm Warning anthologies has there been as audacious and provocative a collection of new poetry. The poets here are in your face and in your heart, celebrating poetry in all its exhilirating variations. What is remarkable are not only the new contexts and new stories, but how respectfully and joyfully the new writers have returned to the poets who wrote before them.

We have been waiting for this new generation. Their eloquent poetry speaks to our times, to who we have been and who we are about to be.

About the Authors
Patrick Lane
Patrick Lane, considered by most writers and critics to be one of Canada's finest poets, was born in 1939 in Nelson, BC. He grew up in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC Interior, primarily in Vernon. He came to Vancouver and co-founded a small press, Very Stone House, with bill bissett and Seymour Mayne. He then drifted extensively throughout North and South America. He worked at a variety of jobs, from labourer to industrial accountant, but much of his life was spent as a poet. He was also the father of five children and grandfather of nine. He won nearly every literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General's Literary Award to the Canadian Authors Association Award to the Dorothy Livesay Prize. In 2014, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada, an honour that recognizes a lifetime of achievement and merit of a high degree. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and translated into many languages. His more recent books include Witness: Selected Poems 1962-2010 (Harbour Publishing, 2010), The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane (Harbour Publishing, 2011), Washita (Harbour Publishing, 2014; shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General's Literary Award), Deep River Night (McClelland & Stewart, 2018) and a posthumous collection, The Quiet in Me (Harbour Publishing, 2022). Lane spent the later part of his life in Victoria, BC, with his wife, the poet Lorna Crozier. He died in 2019.

Al Purdy’s down-to-earth voice populates thirty-three books, including The Cariboo Horses (1965), North of Summer (1967), Sex & Death (1973), and Piling Blood (1984). The two major collections of his work are The Collected Poems of Al Purdy (1986) and Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy (2000). Purdy died in Sidney, BC, on April 21, 2000.


Lorna Crozier has authored numerous books of poetry and received many awards. An Officer of the Order of Canada, Lorna has read her poetry on every continent except Antarctica, and in 2005 she recited a poem for Queen Elizabeth II as part of Saskatchewan's centennial celebration. In 2018, Lorna Crozier received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award.

Out of print

This edition is not currently available in bookstores. Check your local library or search for used copies at Abebooks.

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