The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry

The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry offers readers a reliable, if often risk-taking, guide to the last two decades of contemporary Canadian poetry. In the first book to survey the territory since Dennis Lee’s landmark The New Canadian Poets was published in 1985, critic and poet Carmine Starnino has collected fifty of the most interesting Canadian poets born between 1955 and 1975, many of whom have never made an appearance in a major anthology.

Selected from the lists of more than twenty presses, and serving up nearly two hundred poems, this indispensable volume attempts to identify an emerging openness towards form in Canadian poetry. Concentrating on poets who have launched innovative attacks on traditional verse modes, The New Canon will do much to challenge prevailing insularities and tastes. Also included is a long essay by Starnino that describes and explains the innovative tendencies of this exciting group.

Among the writers represented are Richard Sanger, Julie Bruck, David McGimpsey, Jeffery Donaldson, Bruce Taylor, Diana Brebner, Laura Lush, Christopher Patton, George Elliott Clarke, Stephanie Bolster, Steven Heighton, Sue Sinclair, Ken Babstock, Elise Partridge, David Manicom, David O’Meara, Karen Solie, Barbara Nickel, and Joe Denham.

Reviews

“Judging from this anthology, Canada’s younger generation are more than just promising. Starnino has chosen poems and poets with real sureness of voice, technical inventiveness and a broad range of themes and forms…. [Starnino] has offered us a book of unusual vibrancy and range, and shown himself a persuasive advocate not just of his country’s poetry but of his own generation’s.” –Times Literary Supplement