Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground

Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground

The Poetry of F.R. Scott

By F.R. Scott Edited by Laura Moss Afterword by George Elliott Clarke
Paperback $21.99

$21.99

Publication Date: 1st September 2011

Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground contains thirty-five of F.R. Scott’s poems from across the five decades of his career. Scott’s artistic responses to a litany of social problems, as well as... Read More
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Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground contains thirty-five of F.R. Scott’s poems from across the five decades of his career. Scott’s artistic responses to a litany of social problems, as well as... Read More
Description

Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground contains thirty-five of F.R. Scott’s poems from across the five decades of his career. Scott’s artistic responses to a litany of social problems, as well as his emphasis on nature and landscapes, remain remarkably relevant. Scott weighed in on many issues important to Canadians today, using different terms, perhaps, but with no less urgency than we feel now: biopolitics, neoliberalism, environmental concerns, genetic modification, freedom of speech, civil rights, human rights, and immigration. Scott is best remembered for “The Canadian Authors Meet,” “W.L.M.K,” and “Laurentian Shield,” but his poetic oeuvre includes significant occasional poems, elegies, found poems, and pointed satires. This selection of poems showcases the politics, the humour, and the beauty of this central modernist figure.
The introduction by Laura Moss and the afterword by George Elliott Clarke provide two distinct approaches to reading Scott’s work: in the contexts of Canadian modernism and of contemporary literary history, respectively.

Details
  • Price: $21.99
  • Pages: 80
  • Carton Quantity: 1
  • Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
  • Imprint: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
  • Series: Laurier Poetry
  • Publication Date: 1st September 2011
  • Trim Size: 6 x 9 in
  • ISBN: 9781554583676
  • Format: Paperback
  • BISACs:
    BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary
    LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry
    POETRY / Canadian
Reviews
Scott's poetry humbly argues for a place on our shelves for a Canadian political poetry that is large enough to avoid the petty debate on specifics, yet particular enough not to lose local force.
- Andrew Vaisius, Prairie Fire Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012, 2012 October
Author Bio

Born in 1899 in Quebec City, Francis Reginald (Frank) Scott was a public poet, an accomplished editor and mentor of a generation of writers, an influential professor of constitutional law, and a founding member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Emerging as one of the “Montreal Group” of modernist poets of the 1920s, Scott spent the next five decades writing poetry and working to transform both Canadian poetics and politics. With a penchant for satire, Scott’s work is sometimes playful and witty and sometimes gravely concerned with the legacies of political ineptitude and the fragility of both humanity and the environment.
| Laura Moss is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia and the former director of the UBC International Canadian Studies Centre. She is the associate editor of the journal Canadian Literature, co-editor (with Cynthia Sugars) of the two volume Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (2008, 2009), and the editor of Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature (WLU Press, 2003).
| George Elliott Clarke is the inaugural E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. Named a Trudeau Foundation Fellow in 2005, Clarke is a revered poet, librettist, and novelist. For his collection Execution Poems, he received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2001. His bestselling poetry-novel, Whylah Falls, is a major text in Canadian literature.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents for Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground: The Poetry of F.R. Scott, selected with an introduction by Laura Moss
Foreword | Neil Besner
Biographical Note
Introduction | Laura Moss
Overture
Laurentian Shield
Coelacanth
Orangerie
My Amoeba Is Unaware
Mural
Lakeshore
A Grain of Rice
Incident at May Pond
Miranda
Trans Canada
To Certain Friends
Social Notes I, 1932
Social Notes II, 1935
Lest We Forget
For R.A.S. 1925–1943
W.L.M.K.
The Canadian Social Register
The Canadian Authors Meet
Bonne Entente
Brébeuf and His Brethren
All the Spikes But the Last
Saturday Sundae
Martinigram
A Lass in Wonderland
Picture in “Life”
On Kanbawza Road
On the Death of Gandhi
For Bryan Priestman
Last Rites
Ushering in the Quiet Revolution
Audacity
Fort Smith
A New City: E3
On Saying Goodbye to My Room in Chancellor Day Hall
Villanelle for Our Time
Afterword: Reading “Canon” Scott’s Canon | George Elliot Clarke
Acknowledgements

Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground contains thirty-five of F.R. Scott’s poems from across the five decades of his career. Scott’s artistic responses to a litany of social problems, as well as his emphasis on nature and landscapes, remain remarkably relevant. Scott weighed in on many issues important to Canadians today, using different terms, perhaps, but with no less urgency than we feel now: biopolitics, neoliberalism, environmental concerns, genetic modification, freedom of speech, civil rights, human rights, and immigration. Scott is best remembered for “The Canadian Authors Meet,” “W.L.M.K,” and “Laurentian Shield,” but his poetic oeuvre includes significant occasional poems, elegies, found poems, and pointed satires. This selection of poems showcases the politics, the humour, and the beauty of this central modernist figure.
The introduction by Laura Moss and the afterword by George Elliott Clarke provide two distinct approaches to reading Scott’s work: in the contexts of Canadian modernism and of contemporary literary history, respectively.

  • Price: $21.99
  • Pages: 80
  • Carton Quantity: 1
  • Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
  • Imprint: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
  • Series: Laurier Poetry
  • Publication Date: 1st September 2011
  • Trim Size: 6 x 9 in
  • ISBN: 9781554583676
  • Format: Paperback
  • BISACs:
    BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary
    LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry
    POETRY / Canadian
Scott's poetry humbly argues for a place on our shelves for a Canadian political poetry that is large enough to avoid the petty debate on specifics, yet particular enough not to lose local force.
– Andrew Vaisius, Prairie Fire Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012, 2012 October

Born in 1899 in Quebec City, Francis Reginald (Frank) Scott was a public poet, an accomplished editor and mentor of a generation of writers, an influential professor of constitutional law, and a founding member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Emerging as one of the “Montreal Group” of modernist poets of the 1920s, Scott spent the next five decades writing poetry and working to transform both Canadian poetics and politics. With a penchant for satire, Scott’s work is sometimes playful and witty and sometimes gravely concerned with the legacies of political ineptitude and the fragility of both humanity and the environment.
| Laura Moss is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia and the former director of the UBC International Canadian Studies Centre. She is the associate editor of the journal Canadian Literature, co-editor (with Cynthia Sugars) of the two volume Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (2008, 2009), and the editor of Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature (WLU Press, 2003).
| George Elliott Clarke is the inaugural E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. Named a Trudeau Foundation Fellow in 2005, Clarke is a revered poet, librettist, and novelist. For his collection Execution Poems, he received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2001. His bestselling poetry-novel, Whylah Falls, is a major text in Canadian literature.

Table of Contents for Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground: The Poetry of F.R. Scott, selected with an introduction by Laura Moss
Foreword | Neil Besner
Biographical Note
Introduction | Laura Moss
Overture
Laurentian Shield
Coelacanth
Orangerie
My Amoeba Is Unaware
Mural
Lakeshore
A Grain of Rice
Incident at May Pond
Miranda
Trans Canada
To Certain Friends
Social Notes I, 1932
Social Notes II, 1935
Lest We Forget
For R.A.S. 1925–1943
W.L.M.K.
The Canadian Social Register
The Canadian Authors Meet
Bonne Entente
Brébeuf and His Brethren
All the Spikes But the Last
Saturday Sundae
Martinigram
A Lass in Wonderland
Picture in “Life”
On Kanbawza Road
On the Death of Gandhi
For Bryan Priestman
Last Rites
Ushering in the Quiet Revolution
Audacity
Fort Smith
A New City: E3
On Saying Goodbye to My Room in Chancellor Day Hall
Villanelle for Our Time
Afterword: Reading “Canon” Scott’s Canon | George Elliot Clarke
Acknowledgements

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