How We All Swiftly: The First Six Books brings together the best of Don Coles’s early work, from the long- unavailable poems in Sometimes All Over [1975], Anniversaries [1979], and The Prinzhorn Collection [1982] to much-acclaimed book-length poems K in Love [1987] and Little Bird [1991]. With an incisive introduction by critic and professor emeritus W.J. Keith, this overdue reissue of Coles’s career-defining collections-collections whose austere, tender, insouciant, sad-lit clarity reinvented Canadian poetry-will allow readers to glimpse the evolution and shaping of a major career.
How We All Swiftly will be the first volume in a celebratory two-part overview of Don Coles’s literary writings.
Reviews
“No poet captures the quicksilver twists and turns of our tongues and thoughts more exactly and more memorably than Coles; few can be as exacting or demanding in what they commit to print. Most of all it is Coles’s mastery of syntax, sinuous and unpredictable, that places his poetry among the very best being written in English.” –Globe and Mail
“The verbal stretch that gives Coles’s poetry its adventuring thrill is world class … he has outgrown us and deserves an international readership.” –Montreal Gazette