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Enlarge Cover
list price: $18.95
edition:Paperback
category: Poetry
published: Apr 2004
ISBN:9781550173116
publisher:
Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Description
Thirty-five years after the publication of his first book, Peter Trower has brought together his finest poems for the beautiful, thorough and definitive volume Haunted Hills and Hanging Valleys.
From whistle punk to smelter worker to faller to crane operator, Trower worked up and down the West Coast for 22 years collecting the stories and soaking in the vivid imagery and personalities that would characterize much of his perceptively crafted, musical poetry. Haunted Hills and Hanging Valleys presents for the first time the best work of a writing career that has drawn Trower praise as "the poet laureate of this mountain kingdom" from Al Purdy and for "heft and passion and a gift for telling place and detail" from Irving Layton. This long-awaited book will confirm Trower's place as one of our country's most important poets.
Editorial Reviews
"Peter Trower, though not well known east of BC, is one of our most potent poets still writing. His obscurity can be blamed largely on being pigeonholed as a "logger poet" (Trower toiled twenty-two years in the woods and in a variety of other industrial jobs). This does justice neither to Trower's talent and range, nor to the inherent drama and worth of his subjects. Trower integrates traditions of popular balladry (especially the rhymes of Robert Swanson), savvy knowledge of modernist poetics, atavistic Anglo-Saxon proclivities for alliteration and compound metaphors, and all the strange diction of the logging camp into a poetry that is smart, gutsy (often gut-wrenching) and elegiac. A selection of his best work from 1969 to the present is now conveniently available in one volume: Haunted Hills and Hanging Valleys. This book should establish Trower as the king-feller of Canadian letters that he is."
-Zach Wells, Maisonneuve Magazine
— <i>Maisonneuve</i> Magazine Review
"It's high time [Trower] was recognized more widely as the gifted and versatile force in Canadian poetry that he is. If this fine selection can't garner such recognition, it's hard to imagine what will."
-Zachariah WellsThe Danforth Review
— Danforth
"...one thing is clear: this book really is striking a nerve with poets everywhere... Trower's poems, as capricious and harrowing as they can be (men maimed, alcoholism, dead dreams, dire regret), have an internally consistent language, a bunkhouse vernacular that he wrests beauty from... They're tough poems, vigorous poems, angry poems, hard poems, tender but unsentimental poems, poems that, though short in line length, are mighty in terms of effect... This is a very necessary poet."
- Shane Neilson, ARC
— ARC
