Search results for ""Author Fred Cogswell""

The Stunted Strong is a new edition of the first book published by Fiddlehead Poetry Books, the company that became Goose Lane Editions. Fred Cogswell, its author, was also the company's founder. The Stunted Strong is a sixteen-sonnet chapbook. The first and last poems create a context for the fourteen inner sonnets, each of which is a vivid sketch of an inhabitant of a rural community in the St. John River valley. The sequence portrays country people confined by frustration, obsession, and small victories, and it expresses in their characters the illimitable dreams and thwarting limitations of the human condition. The publication of the second edition of The Stunted Strong marks Goose Lane's 50th anniversary and commemorates Fred Cogswell's lifelong devotion to poetry. The text is introduced by Robert Gibbs, Cogswell's friend, colleague, and fellow poet. Designed and printed by Gaspereau Press, the new edition of The Stunted Strong is a work of art in its own right.

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Conversations, a collection of poetry that won the 1999 Governor General's Award (French Language), is a sequence of 999 numbered fragments that record the essence of verbal interactions between two people. Over a period of a year, Herménégilde Chiasson captured snatches of conversations overheard, conversations he had with other people, even reported conversations. Then he distilled what was said and his observations into a series of single sentences, each attributed to a strangely impersonal He or She. Chiasson has likened his concept to the visual experience of driving: a succession of flashes zooming by, the connections only intuited. The blank spot for entry number 1000 underlines a Zen-like philosophy that suggests that nothing is ever fully completed. In subject matter and technique, Conversations fuses tradition and modernity. Chiasson continues his exploration of the often uncomfortable zone where the mechanical or artificial meets human emotion and spirit. The format participates in the strong and lively Acadian oral tradition, yet the sentences themselves are polished literary jewels, almost epigrammatic in their compactness. Conversations is at the same time as public as a news broadcast and as private as a lover's unspoken thoughts. With ten personal collections of poetry, Herménégilde Chiasson's body of work is among the most prolific in Acadian poetry. Mourir À Scoudouc was published in 1974 to critical acclaim in Acadie and Quebec. In 1976, he made a radical departure in style with his collection of anti-poetry Rapport sur l'état de mes illusions. Busy with filmmaking, the visual arts, and playwrighting, it was a decade before Chiasson published Prophéties in 1986. The 1990s were a prolific time for Chiasson's poetry. His 1991 collections Vous and Existences, broke new ground in the field of experimental poetry and Vous was nominated for a Governor General's Award. Vermeer and Miniatures continued Chiasson's quest to blend the visual with the oral in a unique poetic style. In 1996, Chiasson produced Climats. It was hailed as one of modern Acadie's strongest poetic works and was the first of his books to be translated into English. Climates brought Chiasson his second Governor General's Award nomination. In 1999, Chiasson won the Governor General's Award for his landmark poetic work Conversations, now available in English from Goose Lane Editions.

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Climates is suffused with the single-minded desire to fully inhabit, and be inhabited by, a place: Acadie. The political push-and-pull of being Acadian is a constant, even when the mutability of personal life is in the foreground. The four sections of Climates each correspond to a season, and each is marked by unity of tone, atmosphere, and form.

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