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New and Collected Poems
***CANADA BOOK AWARD WINNER***
***2020 RELIT AWARDS: LONG SHORTLIST***
For almost fifty years, Tom Dawe has stood as one of the most respected and admired poets in Newfoundland. This definitive, necessary collection spans five decades of poetic achievement, reprinting each of Dawe’s published collections while gathering previously uncollected poems along with a stunning body of new work. This volume stands as a testament to a monumental achievement for readers both at home and abroad.
“The value of Dawe’s work lies in how it navigates such shifting identities not by ignoring or romanticizing the past but by looking on it with a tender and necessarily critical eye. His poems may be set firmly in Newfoundland, but they often marshal the timeless, placeless sense of folk tales and in this way achieve universal reach.”
– The Walrus
“In ‘Grand Canyon,’ from his 2019 collection Pilgrim, Tom Dawe recalls Don Marquis, who ‘once said / that publishing a book of poetry / is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon / and waiting for the echo” (55). If this is the case then Dawe’s recent New and Collected Poems is a bouquet of fallen petals that reminds readers, as it reminds the poet, ‘ how wonderful the canyon can be’ (55)… Dawe’s eye for detail is perhaps at its sharpest when focused on the relationship between the human and an ecological world that, while at times threatened by encroachment, also demonstrates both resilience and a fundamental indifference to human suffering… At over 350 pages in length, the collection testifies to a poet with a varied imagination who, over the course of a long career, has written eloquently about topics ranging from fairy tales and folklore to literature and politics. However, when read as a whole, it is the provocative, stark, and sometimes severe environmental poems that seem to best define Dawe’s oeuvre. While the bulk of these poems are not new, they are certainly prescient in an era of environmental crisis. Indeed, that is what makes New and Collected Poems an important contribution to Newfoundland, and Canadian, environmental writing.”
– Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, 34, 2 (2019)
– The Walrus
“In ‘Grand Canyon,’ from his 2019 collection Pilgrim, Tom Dawe recalls Don Marquis, who ‘once said / that publishing a book of poetry / is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon / and waiting for the echo” (55). If this is the case then Dawe’s recent New and Collected Poems is a bouquet of fallen petals that reminds readers, as it reminds the poet, ‘ how wonderful the canyon can be’ (55)… Dawe’s eye for detail is perhaps at its sharpest when focused on the relationship between the human and an ecological world that, while at times threatened by encroachment, also demonstrates both resilience and a fundamental indifference to human suffering… At over 350 pages in length, the collection testifies to a poet with a varied imagination who, over the course of a long career, has written eloquently about topics ranging from fairy tales and folklore to literature and politics. However, when read as a whole, it is the provocative, stark, and sometimes severe environmental poems that seem to best define Dawe’s oeuvre. While the bulk of these poems are not new, they are certainly prescient in an era of environmental crisis. Indeed, that is what makes New and Collected Poems an important contribution to Newfoundland, and Canadian, environmental writing.”
– Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, 34, 2 (2019)
