Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems - Hardcover

Webb, Phyllis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0889229120 ISBN 13: 9780889229129

Publisher: Talonbooks, 2014

Synopsis

When Phyllis Webb published Wilson’s Bowl in 1980, Northrop Frye hailed it as a landmark in Canadian literature”: landmark, an event that marks a turning point in something (in this case, Canadian literature); and an instantly recognized feature of a landscape (in this case, the landscape of Canadian poetry). Wilson’s Bowl was Webb’s fifth volume of poetry. Three more followed and then she fell silent, turning from literature to abstract painting.

Peacock Blue compiles in a single volume all of Webb’s published, unpublished, and uncollected works from a writing career that spanned fifty years. It offers readers the opportunity to relish the arc of Webb’s entire poetic oeuvre, from the modernist lyricism of her early works, to the groundbreaking volume Naked Poems (1965), in which Webb created for herself a new minimalist language; from Wilson’s Bowl to what Douglas Barbour calls Webb’s loving and subversive engagement with the ghazal” in Water and Light (1984); and finally to the postmodernist prose poems of Hanging Fire (1990). The concluding section of Peacock Blue contains almost fifty poems previously uncollected, some of which have never been published before. It is full of brilliant but forgotten poems and poetic surprises.

Brenda Carr has suggested that one of Webb’s later essays, Message Machine” (1990), initiates a re-reading of her poetics and practice ... Against her anxiety that she is a passive message machine’ for masculinist culture Webb posits another possibility – cross-dressing.’ She theorizes her mimicry of the male persona as analogous to a masquerade’ or street theatre’ and in so doing reconstructs even her earlier poems as a performative space in which agency is possible.” The truth of Carr’s insight becomes increasingly apparent to anyone who undertakes to read through Webb’s entire poetic output, gathered together, at last, in Peacock Blue.

About this title

About the Author

Phyllis Webb: Phyllis Webb was born on April 8, 1927, in Victoria, BC. She was educated at the University of British Columbia and McGill University. The first major publication of her poetry was in "Trio," which also included poetry by Eli Mandel and Gael Turnbull. For many years she worked as a writer and broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), where she created the radio program "Ideas" in 1965 and was its executive producer from 1967 to 1969. Webb served as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta from 1980 to 1981 and taught at the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, and the Banff Centre. She is a life member of the League of Canadian Poets and currently resides on Salt Spring Island, BC.
Her 1980 work "Wilson's Bowl" was hailed by Northrop Frye as "a landmark in Canadian poetry." When the book had been passed over for a nomination for the Governor General's Award, a group of fellow poets--led by Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, bpNichol, and P.K. Page--collected $2,300 and sent it to Webb, stating that "this gesture is a response to your whole body of work as well as to your presence as a touchstone of true good writing in Canada, which we all know is beyond awards and prizes" (John F. Hulcoop).
As Stephen Scobie once wrote, the work of Phyllis Webb "has always been distinguished by the profundity of her insights, the depth of her emotional feeling, the delicacy and accuracy of her rhythms, the beauty and mysterious resonance of her images--and by her luminous intelligence."
Phyllis Webb received the BC Gas Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999, the Order of Canada in 1992, and the 1982 Governor General's Award for "Selected Poems: The Vision Tree."
John Hulcoop: Scholar, critic, editor and poet John Hulcoop was born in London, England, in 1930, and pursued his education at University College London. Hulcoop immigrated to Canada in the 1950s and began teaching in the English department at the University of British Columbia, where he is now Professor Emeritus. A nineteenth-century scholar by training, Hulcoop has written on both the novel and the long poem, and has published works on Robert Browning, George Eliot, Truman Capote, and Virginia Woolf. As an editor and critic of Phyllis Webb's work, he edited and wrote the introduction to Phyllis Webb's "Selected Poems of Phyllis Webb, 1954-65" (Talonbooks, 1971) and published "Phyllis Webb and Her Works" (ECW Press, 1990). Hulcoop has also maintained a long friendship with Phyllis Webb. During his college days at University College London, Hulcoop met Jane Rule, resulting in another important friendship. As a critic, Hulcoop pursued a critical interest in Timothy Findley and produced the first major critical essay on Findley's work for "Canadian Literature" (Winter 1981). As an editor and poet he has come into contact with a number of other Canadian writers and has produced two works of poetry, "Three Ring Circus Songs" (Talonbooks, 1968) and "Untuning the Sky" (Pamina Publishing, 2000). John Hulcoop lives and works in Vancouver.

Review

About Naked Poems (1965):
“Naked Poems ... is one of the most influential works of its time, for it suggested a new vision of the book-length poem which profoundly affected a number of poets in the following literary generations. Full of lyric intensity yet transcending mere lyric posturing, Naked Poems is Canada’s first masterpiece of process poetics, a series of precisely crafted minimal texts which remain open to the possibilities of what the third section calls the ‘Non Linear.’ Robert Kroetsch has made perhaps the finest and most concise statement about this innovative and concise work: ‘On nakedness and lyric and yet on a way out, perhaps a way out of the ending of the lyric too, with its ferocious principles of closure, a being compelled out of lyric by lyric.’”
—Canadian Encyclopedia

“a vibrant intelligence coupled with a wry wit ... Webb’s dedication to social justice is evident in her poetry. ... It’s evident from this book that Webb knew many of the major Canadian writers. She dedicates poems to many writers, she refers to writers, and she celebrates the words of others. Trying to capture [this volume] in a review is like trying to catch wind. There’s too much and it’s too powerful. Ultimately all I can say is [‘Read this poet’].”
—Maple Tree Literary Supplement

“Reading her work this way is like watching the seasons change, for people who have been writing as many years as she has don’t ordinarily stand still for long. ... she has remained active politically, gradually settling on a mixture of anarchism, feminism and environmentalism that is to be found only on the West Coast. ... Peacock Blue is a most important book. It’s both a testament and a trophy.”
—Vancouver Sun (2016-05-24)

Edition details

• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0889229120
• ISBN 13: 9780889229129
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512
• Editor: Hulcoop John F.