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Poetry, comic book art, pop culture, concrete poetry, the lyric, the myth of the cowboy, even the myth of the poet-hero: these are just some of the avenues explored by bpNichol in The Captain Poetry Poems. In this short portrait of the poet as a young man, our hero is a dilemma: part fabrication and part confession, Cap is a character created by these poems that extends their author into realms of possible identities. Who is he? Is he a poet? Is he a hero? Is he the bearer of heretofore important and unknown knowledge about the world? Written at a time when questions about what poetry might be; when questions about what the figure of the poet might be, The Captain Poetry Poems shows Nichol working through some of the clichŽs inherant to both his craft and his identity. Playful, even at times silly, but never without the human intelligence Nichol is best known for, these poems may not be the “best” work in Nichol’s oeuvre, but their experiments reveal important considerations for poets and their approach to craft.

Originally published in 1970 as a mimeo production by bill bissett’s seminal blewointment press (the same year that Michael Ondaatje issued his documentary on Nichol titled The Sons of Captain Poetry), smatterings of The Captain Poetry Poems have appeared over the years but never in their entirety. Now, in “official book form” for the first time, these poems will at last be available to scholars, poets, and other fine human beings. With an introduction by bill bissett and an afterword by George Bowering.

Before moving to Prince George in 1969, Barry McKinnon was writing single narrative poems that, in terms of form, began to seem outworn and inadequate in his new environment. The emotional range of the lyric had become too personal and limiting. Starting with a poem based on a discarded fragment and a shoebox of photos his prairie grandfather had taken of the family homestead, he began to piece together his first long poem: “I Wanted to Say Something.” Though this story had nothing to do with Prince George, the form it generated was large enough and open enough to set the possibilities for writing in the larger dimensions of self and place he had been searching for: the political, the social, the institutional, the environmental—the layered and fragmented outside/inside he now found himself in.

Leaving “‘I Wanted to Say Something” behind as an absent precursor, The Centre: Poems 1970–2000 begins, appropriately, with “The Death of a Lyric Poet”—the sequence of poems that initiate his engagement of and life in the north with new and unavoidably present recognitions as sources for the work. The “centre” in this sequence of ten long poems thus shifts from a nostalgic, idealized and elegiac rural singularity to a new relentless multiplicity of the urban, where the centre constantly threatens not to hold. The “centre” in these books becomes simultaneously the shopping centre, the community centre, the industrial centre: a multiplicity of urban attentions reproducing itself as an articulate awareness of a fractured and fragmented self. Beauty appears in this wasteland only through glimpses of externalized objects of desire: a new, materialized “arrhythmia” of the heart, grounded in the scarlet fever of an ever-receding innocence of youth.

Winner of the 2010 A. M. Klein Poetry Prize

Shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize

Descartes asked, How can I know that I am not now dreaming? The Certainty Dream poses similar questions through poetry, but without the trappings of traditional philosophy. Kate Hall’s bracingly immediate, insistently idiosyncratic debut collection lays bare thetricks and tools of her trade: a mynah bird perches in poems but ‘stands for nightingale’; the poet’s antelope turns transparent; she dresses up her orange trees with bark and leaves. As the dream world and the waking world blur, the body and the dimensions it inhabits become a series of overlapping circles, all acting as containers for both knowledge and uncertainty. At times disarmingly plainspoken, at others, singing with lyric possibility, these poems make huge associative leaps. Taken together, they present the argument that to truly ‘know’ something, one must first recognize its traces in something else.

‘Kate Hall unites philosophy and wisdom – without forgetting the chipotle-lime mustard.’

– Montreal Review of Books

‘The Certainty Dream weaves its way through absurdist outbursts and giddy indulgences of graduate-level philosophy while remaining rooted in the immediacy and, yes,the certainty of everyday life … Hall’s poems unfold with wit, colourful layers and no overwhelming sense of ego or pomp.’

– The Dominion

‘These are profoundly perfect poems.’

– Eye Weekly

‘A whimsical and enlightening riff on the philosophic nature of knowing … Hall’s imagination liberates language and subject at every blink.’

– Winnipeg FreePress

Billie Livingston’s poems drive straight for the sharp edges–from the rough, self-assured and brash voice of a woman who poses nude at seventeen while considering the 40-year-old photographer as her guinea pig, to the confidante of relatives and friends grappling with the torturing frustration of love, sexuality, adultery and death.These jagged realities also collide with the innocence of childhood–a toddler being offered LSD by the next-door neighbor, a Catholic schoolgirl being dropped into the frontlines of a fierce abortion protest and a young woman trying to relax with a book in a park but instead facing an unwelcome exposure. Livingston also includes a selection of poems written from the disparate voices of a self-destructive family that eventually developed into her popular novel.