Breathing Fire 2

Breathing Fire II is Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane’s new selection of Canada’s finest young poets.Nine years ago the first volume of Breathing Fire was published to rave reviews, introducing 31 of Canada’s finest new poets to a wide and appreciative audience of readers. The anthology has since gone into several printings and become a basic text in schools and universities across the country. And the poets within, including Michael Redhill, Karen Solie, Tim Bowling, Stephanie Bolster, Michael Crummey, Evelyn Lau, Sue Goyette and Carmine Starnino, have gone on to develop and captivate wide readerships of their own.Today a new and exciting generation of poets has come of age. Some, including Tammy Armstrong, Adam Dickinson, George Murray, Alison Pick, Shane Rhodes, matt robinson, Laisha Rosnau and Nathalie Stephens, have already put out books, and have even won or been shortlisted for major awards. Others with work just as compelling will be introduced for the first time. Breathing Fire 2 collects the best from all 33 of these writers, proudly presenting the next generation of Canada’s poets to the world.

AUTHOR

Lorna Crozier

Lorna Crozier, an Officer of the Order of Canada, is the author of sixteen previous books of poetry, most recently The Wrong Cat and The Wild in You. She is also the author of The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Ordinary Things and the memoir Small Beneath the Sky. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria, has been awarded the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, and is a three-time recipient of the Pat Lowther Award. Born in Swift Current, she now lives on Vancouver Island with writer Patrick Lane and two fine cats.

AUTHOR

Patrick Lane

Patrick Lane, considered by most writers and critics to be one of Canada’s finest poets, was born in 1939 in Nelson, BC. He grew up in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC Interior, primarily in Vernon. He came to Vancouver and co-founded a small press, Very Stone House, with bill bissett and Seymour Mayne. He then drifted extensively throughout North and South America. He worked at a variety of jobs, from labourer to industrial accountant, but much of his life was spent as a poet. He was also the father of five children and grandfather of nine. He won nearly every literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General’s Literary Award to the Canadian Authors Association Award to the Dorothy Livesay Prize. In 2014, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada, an honour that recognizes a lifetime of achievement and merit of a high degree. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and translated into many languages. His more recent books include Witness: Selected Poems 1962-2010 (Harbour Publishing, 2010), The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane (Harbour Publishing, 2011), Washita (Harbour Publishing, 2014; shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Literary Award), Deep River Night (McClelland & Stewart, 2018) and a posthumous collection, The Quiet in Me (Harbour Publishing, 2022). Lane spent the later part of his life in Victoria, BC, with his wife, the poet Lorna Crozier. He died in 2019.

Reviews

In Breathing Fire 2 the latest collection of young Canadian poets from Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, we are given a glimpse of the literary world to come … There is urgency in their words, a cry to be heard … If poetry allows us to distill our experiences of the world into small snapshots of meaning and truth, then we will have to turn to these new writers — inhabitants of this new world — to translate it for us. We will be in good hands.–Byrna Hallam, The Martlet
Readers of the first edition of Breathing Fire, published nine years ago, will remember a formidable collection of young voices largely unknown to Canada’s poetry scene. In Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane’s second introduction to “Canada’s New Poets,” the results are even more impressive.–Shannon Cowan, Globe and Mail
This writing is driven by an underlying, ineffable vitality, a legitimacy — a sense that the words are locked inexorably in place and the poet knows it … There’s much to like in Breathing Fire.–Jon Mooallem, Books in Canada
Crozier and Lane write their intro in celebration, excitement, and gratitude for the good poems they found. For that, and for all their time and attention, they deserve praise … [T]he book can give you hours of intense reading engagement and coax you to search for books you might have taken much longer to discover, or never discovered. A decade or two from now … Breathing Fire 2 is likely to be … a historical time-capsule.–Brian Bartlett, The Malahat Review

Awards

There are no awards found for this book.

Reader Reviews

Details

Dimensions:

200 Pages
9in * 6in * 0.5in
0.84lb

Published:

October 12, 2004

Publisher:

Nightwood Editions

ISBN:

9780889711952

Book Subjects:

POETRY / Anthologies

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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