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Bedlam Cowslip
By Jeanette Lynes
Winner of the 2016 Saskatchewan Arts Board Poetry Award
In this collection Jeanette Lynes' follows in the tradition of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. In Bedlam Cowslip, she turns her attention to the life and work of John Clare, the great Victorian poet ... Read more
Overview
Winner of the 2016 Saskatchewan Arts Board Poetry Award
In this collection Jeanette Lynes' follows in the tradition of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. In Bedlam Cowslip, she turns her attention to the life and work of John Clare, the great Victorian poet of the countryside, one of England's greatest working-class bards. In these poems, the Romantic world of Clare, strewn with wild flowers and dizzy with birdsong, is visited by a new, postmodern voice, and the conversation that ensues across a dozen decades is profound and dazzling.
Painstakingly researched and deftly crafted, the poems share Clare's loves, ambitions, rages and failures. With lines that echo the sharpness of Dorothy Livesay and the richness of Roo Borson, Lynes writes of madness, scarce paper and of the intense attention Clare brought to his world. In this book Lynes has created an uplifting poetic biography on a bright poetic star that has been rising for over a century.
Jeanette Lynes
Jeanette Lynes is the author of six collections of poetry. Her most recent book of poems, Archive of the Undressed (2012), was shortlisted for two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Her previous poetry received the Bliss Carman Award and The New Quarterly's Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Award. Lynes' seventh book of poems, Bedlam Cowslip: The John Clare Poems is forthcoming from Wolsak and Wynn in 2015 under its Buckrider Books Imprint. Her first novel, The Factory Voice (2009) was long-listed for The Scotia Bank Giller Prize and a ReLit Award. She is the inaugural Coordinator of the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan.
Reviews
"A real rapacious romp through the fields of blooms and language. The reader instantly draws closer to Clare and his era through Lynes? wicked ability to empathize with the thoughts, motions, aches and losses of this singular poet. " - Marrow Reviews
"By contemporizing Clare?s language with dazzling wit, Lynes generously transfers her brilliance to her subject. " - Arc Poetry Magazine
"Cloaking herself in the linguistic and political passions of a nineteenth-century peasant-poet boy wonder, Lynes succeeds in reanimating a remarkable, singular voice that might otherwise be hard for many contemporary ears to truly hear, while at the same time inflecting it with her own accent: that of a woman writing in the post-colonial twenty-first century, many generations after the societal changes and tensions that affected Clare, but in a time when his own concerns ring ominously clear. " - Fiddlehead
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Related Blog Posts
Under the Cover: Begun in Grief and Silence—The Writing of Bedlam Cowslip
The romantic world of Victorian England is brought to life in Bedlam Cowslip, the latest collection from Jeanette Lynes, published this past fall by Wolsak & Wynn. Through an exploration of the life and work of John Clare, a working-class bard of the English countryside, ... Read more
- Dimensions 80 pages, 5.75 x 8.50 x .33 in
- Published October 13, 2015
- Publisher Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd.
- Category Poetry
- Keywords Canadian , English , Irish , Scottish , Welsh , Literary
Other titles by Jeanette Lynes
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