Description
Book SynopsisThroughout his career A.M. Klein was concerned primarily with his relationship to his community, seeing himself, and all serious artists, as necessarily shaping and being shaped by the community in which they are rooted. Yet Klein's vision of this relationship was profoundly ambivalent, and this ambivalence is reflected most clearly in his troubled attitude to the two dominant strains in his work, Jewishness and modernism.
In this study of A.M. Klein's work, Zailig Pollock focuses on 'the story of the poet,' which Klein retells again and again at major turning points in his career. Pollock argues that the story reflects Klein's attempt to mediate between his dual Jewish and modernist ambitions. While Klein's Jewishness gave him a sense of rootedness and vocation, it placed constraints on his personal and artistic freedom. Modernism offered Klein freedom for personal exploration and artistic expression, but the rootlessness implicit in modernism repelled him.
The story of
Trade Review
'In A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet, Zailig Pollock has written the most substantial study of Klein since Miriam Waddington's A.M. Klein appeared in 1970. It is an admirable book: expansive, intellectually honest, fastidiously researched. It has all the virtues of a first-rate scholarly monograph.' -- Bruce Taylor Montreal Gazette 'Zailig Pollock's A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet is one of those rare works of Canadian literary criticism that manages to be both scholarly and stylistically fluid - sophisticated but not turgid.' -- Michael Darling Books in Canada
