New Releases by Anne Compton

"Poetry that turns to everyday things and occasions, recalling the persons, places and objects which form the constituents of life."--

"From Governor-General's Award-winning poet Anne Compton, a brilliant, stylish, and provocative book of essays, responding to patterns, overlaps, and tensions in present-day literature and thought. Compton considers here how the writer changes in retirement; the obsession with the house in contemporary fiction; the role of place in poetry; the relationship between poetry and the visual arts; and beauty."--

Anne Compton's fourth collection, Alongside, tells an unexpected love story, one that includes a celebration of beauty that begins in the mind, wanders out into the garden and back again through the library. It is a story that moves between the wild and the domestic. Beauty, like the figure of the fox that appears and re-appears here, is joyous and elusive, glimpsed and gone. Every poem in the book is a conversation, with other writers, with lovers, with books, and an Island past. A conversation about the way in which the unlived life always walks beside us. -- Book Jacket.

The publication of Anne Compton's first two collections marked the arrival of a major voice in Canadian poetry. In this, her third collection, she completes the island trilogy that those two books began, bringing her long, narrative lines into focus on the mysterious metaphysical nature of everyday life, family and literature. Spirit-haunted yet critical, Compton is intermediary here in a complex poetic argument, over which she presides with a confidence ruled by passionate intellect.

Meetings With Maritime Poets is published by Fitzhenry and Whiteside.

Processional is Anne Compton's second book of poems, the follow-up to her widely-acclaimed, award-winning debut, Opening the Island. Here Compton is at the head of a poetic procession, a guide leading readers through a house affected by both daily life and the extraordinary - stopping only to take in the change of seasons and prepare the outside yard for it. With one breath, she tells of life and death, with the next, play and metaphysics, joy and heartbreak. She is a guide like no other, accomplished and versatile, leading by example and from a distance at the same time.

Opening the Island is the highly anticipated first book of poetry by one of Canada's most lyrical voices. Always critical, often iconographic, Anne Compton plumbs the classic themes of life, art, love, and home which are masterfully reshaped into a contemporary landscape rich in color and folds of metaphor. The result is a rhythm of expression, a texture and critique that weave through the day-to-day, yet strike toward the transcendental.

Courageous poet, tireless critic, and leading anthologist of his time, Arthur James Marshall Smith is recognized as one of the most influential and vital forces in Canadian literature. Instrumental in both defining a Canadian tradition in poetry and in promoting the modernist movement in Canadian literature, Smith was a very public figure. This prominent writer, however, produced an impersonal, yet intensely private, intellectual poetry. In A.J.M. Smith: Canadian Metaphysical, Compton exposes “the mind of A.J.M. Smith — its range and development — as revealed in [his] poetry.” Charting and evaluating the overall development of his work, Compton provides fresh insights into Smith’s “least discussed” poems.