Atlantic poetry is enjoying a renaissance unknown since the days of Alden Nowlan, Milton Acorn, and John Thompson. Coastlines features 60 of the region's finest poets in a volume that will whet appetites for more.
The earliest poems in Coastlines were written in the 1950s by the acknowledged greats - Acorn, Nowlan, and Thompson. The collection highlights the works of John Smith and Alfred G. Bailey, Kay Smith, M. Travis Lane, Fred Cogswell, Douglas Lochhead, Elisabeth Harvor, Harry Thurston, Anne Simpson, Sue Sinclair, George Elliott Clarke, Lynn Davies, Sue Goyette, Carole Langille, Brian Bartlett, Matt Robinson and many others.
The Newfoundland section of Coastlines is replete with authors who are or have been faculty and students at Memorial University. Among those contributors are Mary Dalton, Department of English; John Steffler, English professor at Grenfell College; Randall Maggs, associate professor at Grenfell; and Patrick Warner, a poet and librarian in the QE II Library in St. John's. There are also contributions from Al Pittman, Tom Dawe, Richard Greene, Carmelita McGrath, Michael Crummey, Agnes Walsh, Enos Watts and Gordon Rogers.
In the introduction, the authors point to the book as an example of an Atlantic Canadian poetry renaissance. But in creating a comprehensive and historical anthology of the past 50 years, Coastlines also offers readers the opportunity to see the lasting effects of an earlier renaissance - that of the 1950s and '60s when Nowlan and Acorn put the region on the map.
Coastlines is published by Goose Lane Editions (www.gooselane.com).