A collection of the poetic achievements of John Glassco, a Montreal Group poet whose technical giftedness and unimpeachable wordplay brought music and flair to poems characterized by darkness and decay.
Despite his reputation as Canada’s dandy-poet and his approach to writing as ‘a challenge best overcome by panache’, John Glassco’s poems demonstrate a seemingly incongruous preoccupation with rural life and an intense interest in decline, dilapidation and despair. Plagued by chronic self-doubt and the fear of wasting literary effort, Glassco explored, through his poems, ‘graveyards minding their business’, buildings ‘long in standing, longer still in falling’, and the toil of ‘hope battered into habit, and a habit / Running to weariness’. The result is a selection of work that features syntactic daring, a somewhat anachronistic pleasure in constructedness and a compulsion to turn feelings of unsuitability into art.
The Essential Poets Series presents the works of Canada’s most celebrated poets in a package that is beautiful, accessible and affordable. The Essential John Glassco is the twenty-third volume in the increasingly popular series.