New Releases by Don Coles

In A Serious Call, Governor General’s Award-winner Don Coles presents a collection of moments suspended in time: a line of poetry, forgotten for years and remembered as often; a photograph cut out of a 1942 newspaper that saves its subjects not from death but from oblivion; a fond memory of a bookshop in Southwark, where books feed a love of literature and a life-long friendship. In a deceptively plainspoken style enhanced by his signature precision, Coles’s contemplation of everyday moments and objects reveals not only the power of memory, but also the innermost fears and longings of the human spirit.

The third in a celebrated Porcupine’s Quill series of ‘Essential Poets’ that already includes The Essential George Johnston (2007), and The Essential P. K. Page (2008). Volumes in preparation include The Essential Margaret Avison, The Essential James Reaney and The Essential Richard Outram, amongst others.

"Where We Might Have Been transforms family memories, old European haunts, and literary mementoes into tour de force reckonings of mortality. Rarely has Coles'' self-scrutiny been so exposed and exciting."--Publisher.

A collection spanning the career of Don Coles, this compilation of personal essays and reviews combines published prose with vital new pieces that explore the genres of biography and translation. Summing up decades of reading and adventurous travel while investigating the influences on his writing, this assemblage presents Coles as one of Canada''s most incisive literary critics, revealing his unconventional assessments of Graham Greene, Thomas Mann, Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Robert Frost, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and many others. Passionate and progressive, the book is at once a personal memoir and discriminating literary criticism.

With an introduction by critic W.J. Keith, this overdue reissue of Coles''s early virtuosity--a voice whose austere, tender, insouciant, sad-lit clarity reinvented Canadian poetry--allows readers to glimpse the evolution and shaping of a major writer.

Following the death of his wife and child, a cardiologist decamps to Toronto to begin a new life. Upon joining a group of doctors-turned-authors in a university writing course, Dr. Bloom gets wrapped up in a moral quandary involving one of his classmates.

`Most of all, it is Coles''s mastery of syntax, sinuous and unpredictable, that brings his poems alive. The trademark hesitations, asides and parentheses that mark his lines derive from speech (a Hemingway wife is ``one of the specialty, I am/going to risk saying, dishes in the big man''s/moveable feast'''') and are all measured out and weighed in beautifully constructed sentences. They reflect, I will risk saying, a radical skepticism: ``Nothing/here doubts itself, from which it follows/there is not a hint of me here, '''' he tells us. This doubt, perhaps Coles''s most modern trait, runs through and enriches all of Kurgan (as it did his great book-length poem Little Bird) and places his poetry among the very best being written in English.'' - Richard Sanger - Globe & Mai

Don Coles has earned a reputation as one of Canada''s finest contemporary poets with books such as "The Prinzhorn Collection" and "Little Bird." In his new poetry collection, "Forests of the Medieval World," he explores the power of memory. Shadowy figures from the past -- a woman in a car, a child at the seashore, a father''s college basketball teammates -- float through the poems of the book''s first section. A modern tale of love is intertwined with an account of the destruction of Europe''s medieval forests. The poet recalls the baseball games and adventure books of his boyhood; he dreams of what death would be like for Cambridge University''s Wren Library; and he listens to long-dead fathers'' giving counsel to their troubled daughters'' in a nursing home. Rounding out the volume is a haunting sequence of poems about the private world of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. The Edvard Munch Poems'' were inspired by Coles''s reading of Munch''s diaries, which are still largely untranslated. Best known for his famous work The Cry, '' Munch was a lonely and painfully sensitive man. He returned obsessively in his paintings to the pivotal events of his early life: the deaths of his mother and his beloved sister, Sophie, and his adolescent affair with a married woman, the mysterious Fru H.'' The departure point for each of these poems is one of Munch''s paintings and most are offered in the voice of the artist himself. Coles, whose collection "K. in Love" explored the inner thoughts of writer Franz Kafka, is a master at suggesting character through the nuances of poetic expression.

The frame of Don Coles'' Little Bird is a love letter to his father. It is also about their familial bond and the "languages" they used to conduct that relationship. Little Bird is a subtle, wise, witty exploration of the inheritance of language, of family circumstances, and, ultimately, of love.

K. in Love is an adventure of a very risky sort: a series of unabashedly loving anecdotes displaying delicate vitality and pure lyricism. Coles makes it work precisely because of the vulnerabilities, the hesitations, those slenderest of threads strung between absence and presence, possibility and probability.