[Tony Barnstone]

Hi All,

Yes, okay, I did in the end get tired of waiting, and responding to calls I hereby change the rules.

As of now, each poster can nominate up to 5 books for the list. With current posters, that might get us to 100, I hope!

When we're done, I was thinking of cutting out the commentary and putting the whole list together as one document.

Best, T

[Roger Slater]

I don't think an explanation is called for.

[Nigel Mace]

OK, Tony. Providing you don't chuck it out for language reasons, this MacDiarmid masterpiece for all the reasons I've already given. Oh - and add to the list of languages from which there are translations in the body of the work - Italian as well.

There are plenty of the modern paperback around on Amazon etc. but try AbeBooks or such for the lovely little pocket-size hardback published in 1962 in an edition by The 200 Burns Club of Edinburgh with David Daiches nicely judged essay in the Appendix B. Quite an act of homage considering the poet's blistering accounts of Burns Clubs in general!

[GlennNicholls]

Great thread. I was about to nominate Timothy Steele - Sapphics and Uncertainties - Poems 1970-1986, but saw that he was already selected.

Schnackenberg is a brilliant metrical poet. This can also be purchased as part of Supernatural Love.

[Bill Carpenter]

As promised. Thanks, Tony.

There is a taut compression to Lattimore's Iliad that provides an archaic flavor to the non-reader of Greek and creates an atmosphere of combustible energy. Some prefer it to the more recent translations. Hector's prophecy to Andromache is especially good.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I can't make up my mind, what with only two votes. If I don't dawdle until it is too late, it will be a woman poet, for sure. Schnackenberg was on my short list, but now that is taken care of. My alltime, top of the list, best ever is undoubtedly Lattimore's Illiad. I do wish everyone hadn't been given five votes. The interest here is greater than one might think. It isn't easy to select two out of the gazillion books available.

[Edward Zuk]

Edwin John Pratt is perhaps the most important Canadian poet of the 20th century. He began by writing ballads and lyrics about his native Newfoundland (the gems “The Ice Floes” and “Newfoundland” are highly readable today). He then tried to out-Eliot Eliot with the quatrains of “From Stone to Steel” and “The Prize Cat,” then turned to writing free verse and long blank verse narratives about Canadian history. The most notable of the narratives are “Brébeuf and His Brethren,” about a French-Canadian priest who is captured and tortured by Natives, and “Toward the Last Spike,” about the construction of a trans-Canada railway.

I should also mention that he was a friend and colleague of Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto.

As a sample, here’s the ending to “The Ice-Floes,” about a seal hunting expedition that ended in tragedy:

And the rest is as a story told
. . . Or a dream that belonged to a dim, mad past,
Of a March night and north wind’s cold,
. . . Of a voyage home with a flag half-mast;
Of twenty thousand seals that were killed
. . . To help to lower the price of bread;
Of the muffled beat . . . of a drum . . . that filled
. . . A nave . . . at our count of sixty dead.

[David Rosenthal]

I am fond of my Penguin Selected, edited by Robert Faggen, and I am sure both the Mezey and Donaldson collections are good, but I am putting in the Collected because it contains all of Children of the Night and because its original edition in 1922 won Robinson his first of three Pulitzers. Here's an amazon link, and here is a link to read it online at Bartelby.com.

David R.

[David Rosenthal]

Bill, I am glad you put Lattimore's Illiad on the list -- a masterpiece.

David R.

[Bill Carpenter]

Hear hear for E.J. Pratt! I read long patches from Brebeuf to my friends on a trip to the Boundary Waters. We didn't run into any Hurons, but we did have a priest along.

I should say I learned of Pratt thanks to Edward's on-line essay on him. Bill