To build a shadowy isle of bliss

A powerful reappraisal of radicalism in the life and work of William Morris.

Ripping down half the trees

One out of every twenty students in the adult education classes Evan J teaches in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, dies every year; the surviving students are often afflicted by severe racism, poverty, addictions, and violence. Ripping down half the trees engages with these struggles, offering a catalogue...

Rags of night in our mouths

Rags of Night in Our Mouths is an exploration of human and environmental states of precarity and vulnerability, and a vibrant hymn to the sustaining forces of wilderness, creativity, and compassion. Margo Wheaton constructs a hallucinatory world of fragility, chaos, and searing natural beauty as ...

Aboutness

Set against a break-up with God, insomniac nights, and smoke-filled skies, aboutness is by turns wry, performative, and sober. Threads of self-making are juxtaposed with an ever-unfolding present exposing the limits and possibilities of convergence. Haunted by the ghost of the text not realized, ...

Empties

The varied meanings of empties coalesce in vivid and timely poems that teach endurance “in the face of all that won’t / be saved” while finding much in the world “to cherish / as it brinks.”

Small theatres

Marshalling minimalist and objectivist techniques and a relentless attention to the fissures running through every moment of our lives, Small Theatres gives shape to a reality constantly on the verge of collapse.

A different wolf

A critical, poetic celebration of Alfred Hitchcock's life and work.

Canada to ireland

Canada to Ireland explores the poetry and prose of twelve Irish writers and nationalists in Canada between 1788 and 1900. The book demonstrates that Canadian cultural nationalism left its mark on both countries. Contemporary decolonization movements in Canada and cultural exchanges between Irelan...

Take the compass

A strong theme of journeys is threaded through Take the Compass. In a sense, every poem is itself a journey – through cities and their outskirts, to rivers, forests, and graveyards. They travel in time into the troubled present, across decades into childhood, and into our perilous collective futu...

David lodge and the tradition of the modern novel

An engaging study of one of the most popular contemporary British novelists.

The night chorus

Poems that give voice and agency to marginal figures in rural places and cityscapes.

Psychedelic prophets

Letters between the men who coined the term "psychedelic" and opened doors to a different way of thinking about human consciousness.

Ganymede's dog

A collection of prose poems that mingles tales from the classical past with contemporary sexuality and timeless dogs.

Movingparts

In Edward Carson’s provocative new work, the poetic moving parts of movingparts confront and breathe new life into what’s true and what’s not in Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Crow, as well as the shifting, often fragmentary ground between what’s said and what’s not about identity and intimacy in ...

Ovid and masculinity in english renaissance literature

A comprehensive and nuanced analysis of how Ovid's poetry gave vigour and vitality to male voices in English Renaissance literature - how his works inspired English writers to reimagine the male authorial voice, the male body, desire, and love in fresh terms.

The complete poems of george whalley

The poems of a Canadian modernist best known for his investigations into poetic process.

Short histories of light

Vivid, haunting, and rhythmical, these poems illuminate the struggles of mental illness and uncover the sinister side of religion.

Scar/city

SCAR/CITY steps outside binary conversations and poetically interrogates a system that results in depravity and scarcity leaving us homeless literally and metaphorically. These poems walk streets and take snapshots of the impact financialization of our homes has on our sense of community and belo...

Palilalia

Don't you know that mine too was the ventriloquist's thrown voice, and that what I spoke was a stirred echo?

North american gaels

A groundbreaking exploration of the literature and folklore of North America's Irish and Scottish Gaelic-speaking diaspora since the eighteenth century. North American Gaels shines new light on the ways Irish and Scottish Gaels have left an enduring mark through speech, story, and song.

Around 1945

How novels expanded human and legal rights in the age of the atomic bomb.

Water quality

In lush and vivid poems, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham ponders the urgent question, What does water want? Whether as the body of a beloved lake, where people wrestle with the concerns of stewardship, or as the sea in which to sail and drift, or as a gene pool that simmers through a family’s veins, wate...

The collected poetry of carol shields

Carol Shields received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries. Yet she also wrote hundreds of poems over the span of her career. This collection includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging...

Cast from bells

Subtle and surprising poems connecting the use of bells in wartime with shifts in the nature of affection.

Murmuration

In a photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes the shape of a giant bird. This is the metaphor that best describes the collection: individual poems moving together in liquid formation and, for perhaps a singular moment, assuming the outline of the author, helplessly ever-chang...

Blindfold

Blinded by a grenade in Lebanon as a teenager, poet John Asfour came to Canada armed with James Joyce's words, "For the eyes, they bring us nothing. I have a hundred worlds to create and I am only losing one of them." Blindfold investigates the ways in which disability influences our lives and is...

Trio

One woman. Two lovers. It's a complicated dance.

Whereabouts

In this riddling and seeking book of poems, Edward Carson navigates the emotional, often contradictory intelligence of the heart and mind. In three interrelated segments, whereabouts powerfully charts the tight emotional spaces between thinking and language, beauty and perception, love and the po...

Tablature

Dazzling poems about landscape, music, and the course of love that go straight to the heart.

Vlarf

In the early 2000s flarf poetry emerged as an avant-garde movement that generated disturbing and amusing texts from the results of odd internet searches. In Vlarf Jason Camlot plumbs the canon of Victorian literature, as one would search the internet, to fashion strange, sad, and funny forms and ...

Dreamcraft

Dreamcraft is a book that crosses distances and straddles boundaries. Moving from whistleblower law to the mimetic properties of DNA, from “the entropic spread / of the drifting cosmos / after the big bang” to “the push of lawn grass / under foot,” Scott interrogates topics that have occupied his...

Check

Poems about confirmation bias: expect it to be true, it's true.

Act normal

These poems are inquisitive, desiring to evade the grasp of the normative, as endured by those institutionalized by, and through, the concept of normalcy. act normal invites readers to re-orient from the normative task of assuming the safety of consensual interpretation, while risking, cherishing...

Orchid heart elegies

What happens when someone we loves dies? Orchid Heart Elegies explores the fragmentation of loss. In luminous poems that echo the Duino Elegies, Zoe Landale – like an edgy, modern-day Rilke – takes the reader to a place of amazement and explores the fragmentation of loss.

Hook

Poems based on witnessed and lived experience that bridge literary and activist worlds.

Grotesque tenderness

Resonant poems that find beauty in intimate failures and regrets.

Dust blown side of the journey

Global migrations and music create a symphonic journey where nature ignites wildfires and love fully lived.

The swailing

Firmly rooted in frostbitten, fire-haunted landscapes that are at once psychological, emotional, and fiercely real, Patrick Errington’s first collection traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness.

Race riots

From Black Mischief to The Buddha of Suburbia, twentieth-century British fiction is rife with racial humour. Challenging the common reluctance to take such comedy seriously, Michael Ross shows how humour directed at ethnic "others" exposes deep-seated national attitudes. Race Riots explores the d...

D.h. lawrence and attachment

Using concepts from attachment theory, D.H. Lawrence and Attachment presents innovative readings of Lawrence’s fiction. Ronald Granofsky teases out hidden patterns in Lawrence’s work, deepening our understanding of his fictional characters and revealing new significance to key thematic concerns l...

Side effects may include strangers

Poetry that explores the beauty of themes often considered undesirable - pain, disability, and the aging body.

Look here look away look again

To look is to fill our thoughts and consciousness with an experience of the other.

The selected essays of sean o'faolain

The first collection of essays by one of the most important public intellectuals in Ireland.

Twofold

The form of the diptych shapes language and meaning, symmetry and difference. Edward Carson’s twofold delivers a liminal gathering of short diptych poems exploring themes of love, relationships, myth, art, language, math, physics, geometry, and artificial intelligence, framed within Ovidian and H...

On wings of moonlight

Elliot R. Wolfson is the author of several critical books on medieval Jewish mysticism. On Wings of Moonlight focuses on the poetic nature of Wolfson's works through an exploration of his poems, many of which appear in Pathwings: Philosophic and Poetic Reflections on the Hermeneutics of Time and ...

The world as event

Since the death of Dylan Thomas in 1953, British poetry has been influenced largely by two contrasting poets -- Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes -- each attracting partisan admirers and imitators and each, by this time, granted deserved prominence in the mainstream of English poetic tradition.

Aestheticism and the canadian modernists

Using a wide range of scholarly evidence to support his argument that most poets of the first Canadian Modernist generation were strongly influenced by the ideas and practice of literary Aestheticism, Brian Trehearne provides new readings of Canadian poets such as Robert Finch, John Glassco, W.W....

As though life mattered

In Montreal in the 1920s and 1930s, a small group of radical young writers Leo Kennedy, Frank Scott, A.M. Klein, and A.J.M. Smith transformed Canadian poetry with enthusiasm, talent, and the creation of a modern alternative press.

Stranger gods

In Stranger Gods Roger Clark offers an ambitious and wide-ranging study of Salman Rushdie's seven published novels, with a special focus on his earliest, Grimus, and his most powerful and provocative, Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses. Clark shows how Rushdie employs cosmology, m...

Barbarous dissonance and images of voice in milton's epics

Elizabeth Sauer brings a new perspective to Milton scholarship through her examination of the relative status and authority of the multiple narrative voices in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. She argues that Milton's epics accommodate a variety of interpretive voices, episodes, and dramatic ...

The polliticke courtier

Michael Dixon applies rhetorical theory to The Faerie Queene, highlighting the importance of rhetoric and locating the inventio, or organizing principle, of Spenser's epic narrative in the conception of justice. He demonstrates how Spenser adapts classical rhetoric to the poetics of romance-epic ...

The mystic leeway

Who is Frances Gregg? In her youth she was a poet in her own right, a friend of Ezra Pound, and an intimate of Hilda Doolittle and John Cowper Powys. In our literary history, particularly the history of Modernism, she has been a mysterious presence. Now, with this publication for the first time o...

Particles

"There's a gap between where / an electron is and where it might be / and that's the only real work-place. / You occupy that office of possibility." Where are you in that space between the electron and the galaxy, and how do you find yourself there? Particles asks this question and answers it by ...

Styles of meaning and meanings of style in richardson's clarissa

Gordon Fulton provides a fascinating new study of styles in Samuel Richardson's masterpiece, Clarissa, connecting the style the characters deploy in their speech and letters with their positions in society. Fulton argues that the novel is a critical examination of the relationship between languag...

We all begin in a little magazine

When Arc began publishing in 1978, it had one aim: to publish the best work by Canada's new and established poets. Celebrating Arc's first two decades, We All Begin in a Little Magazine testifies to how fully the editors realized their aspirations. It provides a rich cross section of Canada's poe...

Jewish presences in english literature

In a collection of insightful critical essays, Derek Cohen, Deborah Heller, and the contributing authors explore the different ways in which writers of English literature have amplified, varied, or denied this archetypical perception.

The thin smoke of the heart

It is that sort of morning for the heart; the living are giving the dead an honest test. A man has walked out to be alone with the earth. A man of his age, he equates time with grief most days, but now he has decided to wait. In the silence, where do his raised eyes fit? --from Vow

Joseph brodsky and the soviet muse

Research concerning Joseph Brodsky has emphasized two aspects of his work - his poetry and philosophy as an exile from the Soviet Union. The resulting scholarship has presented him as a fundamentally dissident author with little or no positive connection to the social and literary environments in...

The history of emily montague

Frequently called the first Canadian novel, The History of Emily Montague, presents subversive views on traditional subjects like love and marriage and introduces such unique Canadian themes as the relationships between the Québecois and their British con

What really matters

Home resonates in this collection. Heart longs for the Prince Edward Island birthplace left behind, memory building like early frost on fresh laundry. But there is another sense of home for this poet of the Irish diaspora, deep down in legacies of poetry and family lore, bred-in-the-bone, read in...

A strange manuscript found in a copper cylinder

With its curious mixture of adventure, natural history and satire this early Canadian novel has become a landmark work of fantasy and science fiction.

The captive of the castle of sennaar

The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar is a utopian novel in two parts. In this scholarly edition, G.E. Bentley, Jr, places George Cumberland's late eighteenth-century work among the earliest historical novels in English and identifies it as a rare example of the "Romantic novel." He shows that whi...

Honest sins

Originally cruel, manipulative, and self-serving, during the eighteenth century the Restoration rake evolved into a more cheerful sinner: the good-natured libertine. While Tom Jones was Henry Fielding's most complete embodiment of this new ideal, Tiffany Potter shows that the revised Georgian lib...

The gaelic vision in scottish culture

Romantic aversions

Romanticism is often regarded as a turning point in literary history, the time when writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge renounced the common legacy of poets and sought to create a new literature. Yet despite their emphasis on originality, genius, and spontaneity, the first-generation Romanti...

Germany as model and monster

In Germany as Model and Monster Gisela Argyle details allusions in English novels to German social, cultural, and political life. Such allusions serve as criticism of English life and of English conventions of fiction. Beginning her study with Thomas Carlyle's "Germanizing" efforts in the 1830s a...

Before we had words

Words across a Ouija Board: Memory is the mother of the Muses, said the Greeks. What we write are shadows of recollections, fictions growing out of other fictions. But now these words grow out of memory failing, as where and when blanch slowly to perhaps. The two who sheltered from the sudden dow...

In search of paradise

In Search of Paradise is the story of an Italian family which, having lived for generations in an isolated mountain town in Abruzzi, Italy, is forced by World War II and economic hardship to pull up roots and re-establish in Canada. Presented as a series

Spenser and the poetics of pastoral

The Shepheardes Calender (1579) signalled Spenser's desire to assume the role of an English Virgil and at the same time his readiness to leave behind the pastoral world of his apprenticeship and his early persona, Colin Clout. Yet Spenser was twice to return to the pastoral world of Colin Clout, ...

At home in time

Patrick Deane argues that modern English poetry, in some key aspects, is deeply indebted to the classical tradition and, more particularly, to the attitudes and modes of the eighteenth century. He illustrates how neo-Augustan values are apparent in the works of T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNe...

Milton's leveller god

David Williams advances a progressive and democratic interpretation of Milton's epics to show they are more relevant than ever. He traces echoes between Milton's texts and Leveller writings that advocated for popular rule, extended suffrage, and religious tolerance, arguing that Milton's God is s...

Last child to come inside

These are poignant, at times strangely quirky entries into a world filled with sharpness, the sense of imminent danger, and a sensual urge that seems to sweep all danger before it. the border between exterior and interior life is diffuse. One can find oneself in unexpected places. Two little girl...

The landing

The poems in The Landing, Sinnett's first collection, reflect on a life divided in two by a move from England to Canada. Ontario's glacial landscape is the backdrop for a darkly humorous, often unsettling look at the nature of love and commitment at the end of the twentieth century. This is a tim...

The tantramar re-vision

Inspired by the literary landscape of the late poet John Thompson, Kevin Irie's The Tantramar Re-Vision presents a portrait of nature where the benign and the bedevilled coexist, collude, or collide. The lyrical poems in this collection charts routes of discovery as it follows trails, waterways, ...

Kingsley amis

Uncovering Kingsley Amis's hidden artistic agenda.

Mosaic orpheus

Maturing reflections on a changing world.

The birth of new criticism

A groundbreaking account of the origins of the twentieth century's most influential method for studying poetry.

Fear of the ride

The asparagus feast

Once she woke me in the streaky dark to savour one of her delights - "larks against bells," she called it. We carried our coffees down to the minty garden and waited ankle-deep in dew. Across the shallow valley, the early traffic crept in glimmers through the groundmist. At dawn the cannonade of ...

Autumn harvest

Autumn Harvest brings a decade of Stanley Frost's poems together in one anthology that is varied in both style and content.

Archibald lampman

How Archibald Lampman articulated the Canadian response to nature and introduced radical politics into the nation's literary salon.

True poetry

Ontario is not a homogeneous culture, but rather a conglomerate of ethnic cultures and rural and urban populations. In True Poetry: Traditional and Popular Verse in Ontario, Pauline Greenhill describes and evaluates the significance of folk verse, suggesting that it provides a method for creating...

Poetic argument

Poetic Argument studies argument as both a theme and a technique of poetry. Jonathan Kertzer considers how poets argue for, rather than merely assert, their truths. In a theoretical essay and detailed analysis of the works of five poets - Marianne Moore, Edward Thomas, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, a...

The language of the senses

In this stimulating and original analysis of some of the most important nineteenth-century poems in English, Kerry McSweeney offers an alternative to non-referential and New Historicist critical methods.

Wavelengths of your song

Intuitive environmentalism from the Canadian North is carried forth into creative global adventuring.

Coming to canada

In a record breaking "hat trick," Carol Shields was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel,The Stone Diaries, the Canadian Governor General's Literary Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize. Carleton University Press is pleased to release a newly designed ...

Solitude versus solidarity in the novels of joseph conrad

Solitude Versus Solidarity in the Novels of Joseph Conrad is a structural and thematic analysis of early modern British fiction with an intellectual foundation consisting of political theory, sociology, and philosophy. Key theoreticians include Charles Darwin, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Karl Mannh...

Her festival clothes

The road to egdon heath

Many people spend considerable sums of money on arduous trekking holidays in frozen wastelands or through scorched deserts. These places, which would once have been considered cursed and avoided at all cost, are now sought out or seen as the epitome of a

Stages and playgoers

Stages and Playgoers demonstrates the long, vital tradition of dialogue between stage and audience from medieval, through Tudor, to Jacobean drama. Janet Hill offers new insights into techniques of addressing playgoers from the stage and how they might have operated under particular staging condi...

Medieval arts doctrines on ambiguity and their places in langland's poetics

In Medieval Arts Doctrines on Ambiguity and Their Place in Langland's Poetics John Chamberlin helps readers of Piers Plowman understand some of the most characteristic and inventive elements of Langland's work. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Chamberlin brings together an examination of Lang...

A reader of modern urdu poetry

A penetrating look at modern American politics and the partisan culture that feeds off its turmoil.

Signature

The enterprises of robert hamilton

John clare and the bounds of circumstance

As a working-class poet, born in 1793 to an impovisherished family in rural England, John Clare has often been considered of interest for the unusual nature of his life and career rather than for his poetry. In this book, Johanne Clare argues that he should be taken seriously both as a poet and a...

The canadian brothers

The Canadian Brothers or the Prophecy Fulfilled is a fictionalized narrative of events, people and places from the author's childhood and adolescence in Amherstburg, Upper Canada, that reflects foundation myths about Ontario and Canada and reveals their d

Aristotle's poetics

George Whalley's English translation of the Poetics breathes new life into the study of Aristotle's aesthetics by allowing the English-speaking student to experience the dynamic quality characteristic of Aristotle's arguments in the original Greek.