Selected Poems – Fred Cogswell

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Selected Poems – Fred Cogswell

By (author): Jo-Anne Elder

The poems in this selection were written and published between 1954 and 1977, except for two poems which have never appeared in book form before. Fred Cogswell writes crystalline poems. A Cogswell poem is the result of concentration; this intentional focusing on a particular person or thing, or language itself for that matter, enables him to cross over the pitfall of dull colloquialism. His sole obsession is to capture, to quote Stanislavsky, the life of a human spirit.

AUTHOR

Jo-Anne Elder

Born in East Centreville, New Brunswick, Canadian poet Fred Cogswell (1917-2004) served overseas in the Canadian Army during the Second World War. Cogswell published numerous collections of poetry including Black and White Tapestry (1989), In Praise of Old Music (1992) and The Trouble With Light (1996). In 1958, Cogswell, along with close friend and travelling poet Warren Kinthompson and a group of students and faculty from the University of New Brunswick, founded Fiddlehead Poetry Books, now one of Canada’s important small press publishers operating asGoose Lane Editions. He was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1981.