Search results for ""Author Zailig Pollock""

Throughout 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 the poet who engages in a strategic inner retreat from a hostile or, at best, indifferent society, eventually returning as a redeemer of the society which spurned him, was first formulated in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens. ' It was most fully articulated in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' and The Second Scroll, and abandoned only in the despairing works which immediately preceded Klein's final breakdown and silence.This is the first book to survey all of Klein's poetry, prose, and journalism, published and unpublished, and place it in the context of its times.

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P.K. Page is best known as one of Canada's finest poets, but over the course of her career she has also written a number of essays - meditations - on her life and work, on the nature of art and the imagination, and on Canadian works of literature, painting, and film that have had special significance for her. As lovers of her poetry would hope and expect, these essays are beautiful, intelligent, moving, and delightfully quirky. The Filled Pen brings together the most important of these essays, including two previously unpublished: A Writer's Life and Fairy Tales, Folk Tales: The Language of the Imagination. Zailig Pollock, Page scholar and professor of English at Trent University, has edited and annotated this collection for admirers of Page's work, general readers, and academics alike. The essays, which cover a period of approximately forty years, reflect Page's enduring concerns as a verbal and visual artist with the power of art and the imagination to transcend the barriers that limit our perceptions of the world and our sympathies with our fellow human beings. Page is more interested in posing questions than imposing answers; and fascinated as she is by a wide range of ideas, from ancient mysticism to modern neurophysiology, it is images, endlessly evocative and suggestive, that matter to her most. Her comments on A.M. Klein from "A Sense of Angels", one of the most moving and perceptive tributes by one poet to another, apply very much to the P.K. Page we see in The Filled Pen: "For all his interest in the immediate world ...for all his acceptance of ideological and psychological theory, he seemed to reach beyond both to a larger reality."

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