E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Lazy Bastardism is the startling title of one of the books anyone interested in Canadian poetry criticism should read - that may seem like a narrow, even laughably narrow, genre, but Canadian poet-critics have a long and impressive history of polemical writing, at least since the 1940s.  This 2012 book, beautifully produced by Gaspereau, is a readable selection of essays by Carmine Starnino , an editor for Reader's Digest , Signal Editons and a prize-winning poet.  Subjects include John Glassco , Margaret Atwood , and Modern Canadian Poets .

Sad news.  One of Canada's greatest poets, Daryl Hine , has died suddenly, at the age of 76.  When Evan Jones and I co-edited Modern Canadian Poets for Carcanet in 2010, we began with very few certitudes.  One of them was that Hine would be included.  He was a master formalist, perhaps the major North American formalist (alongside Wilbur), a delicious wit, and the former editor of Poetry magazine: a truly cosmopolitan Canadian.

Zach Wells There is a Canadian poet-critic called Zach Wells  who fancies himself a man of the people, and he proudly guards the borders of Canadian poetry and letters.  As far as I can tell, Wells is not widely published outside of North America, but he seems, in this recent review for a well-known online American magazine, to have gone out of town, for the bitter-bile sweepstakes.  His review is a model of what, exactly, makes Canadian poetry so small, in the main.  Its outlook is provincial, pinched, and unflinchingly ungenerous.  His main argument is that it is difficult to anthologise Canadian poetry.  He then takes myself and co-editor Evan Jones to task for trying to do just that, when we put together the first British anthology of Canadian poetry in over 50 years.  No imagination is used to conjure with just how improbable, and by extension, challenging, such a project was, to conceive and achieve. Rather, the focus is unrele...

January 10, 2011 Modern Canadian Poets anthology launch Toronto A.F. Moritz reads with co-editor Evan Jones Bethune College 320, York University 4700 Keele Street Toronto, ON 13:30-15:00

Ian Pople weighs in on Modern Canadian Poets over at The Manchester Review .

Carcanet Twelve Days of Christmas Sale: Illustration by Carry Akroyd, from John Clare's The Shepherd's Calendar The Carcanet Twelve Days of Christmas Sale is still on! To celebrate the festive season Carcanet are offering a 25% discount on chosen books, including poetry, fiction, photography and essays. This is a varied selection of a dozen highlights from 2010 as well as some older favourites. We will also be giving away a free copy of Five American Poets , an anthology edited by Michael Schmidt (RRP £14.95), to anyone who spends over £30 on their order from www.carcanet.co.uk . Delivery within the UK is free as usual. Click here for more information.     Our Twelve Books of Christmas are: Likenesses by Judith Aronson Collected Poems 1956- 1987 by John Ashbery A Field of Large Desires by Anthony Astbury Selected Poems by James K. Baxter Some Do Not. . . Parade's End Volume I by Ford Madox Ford Heart's Wings and other stories b...