Chris Wiseman stayed at the Marine Hotel in North Berwick, Scotland, in 2000, about eighteen months after the American novelist John Updike. Wiseman believes he stayed in the same room as that in which Updike is reported to have watched High Society (1956). Here Wiseman collects his best work, alongside a section of new and previously unpublished poetry. Described by Lee Shedden of The Calgary Herald as `a testament to a lifetime of dedication to the poet's craft,' In John Updike's Room won the City of Calgary's W.O. Mitchell Award in 2006.
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`Time's circle draws us in', Christopher Wiseman writes in one of his finest poems, and it's the continuous, poem after poem, vivid and tender evocation of Time that gives this collection its cachet, its utterly distinctive and, as the pages turn, increasingly obvious stand-alone quality. This is a voice which cares not how nakedly and vulnerably it speaks its truths: the brittle safety-first impersonality of post-modernism is kept far hence, like Eliot's dog; if we will only enter into these finely-crafted poems with half the longing that they so richly have for remembered bliss, for the `faint persistent music' (from the same Wiseman poem) of our own lives and the lives of those we have known or admired or even, and not seldom here, adored -- sporting heroes, dance-hall tunes, film beauties, early and also late loves -- then, ah then, we'll know we've been allowed into an emotion-laden space that's wider and deeper and, for sure, less predictable than what the fashions of the age have trained us to expect, to endure, to put up with.'
(Don Coles)Born and educated in Britain, Christopher Wiseman came to Canada in 1969. He taught at the University of Calgary, where he founded the Creative Writing programme, until his retirement in 1997. His poetry, short fiction and critical writings have been published and broadcast extensively in Canada, Britain and the United States. His poetry has won two Province of Alberta Poetry Awards, the Poetry Prize from the Writers Guild of Alberta, the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize and an Alberta Achievement Award for Excellence in the literary Arts. He has served on the Board of the Alberta Foundation for the Literary Arts, as President of the Writers Guild of Alberta, and as editor and poetry editor of both ARIEL and Dandelion. Christopher Wiseman lives in Calgary.
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Book Description Condition: New. In John Updike's Room: New and Selected Poems-POETRY. Seller Inventory # 33437-39
Book Description Soft cover. Condition: New. 1st Edition. Original printed wraps. 224 pp. Octavo. In In John Updike's Room, one of Canada's major poets has gathered the best from his first eight books, and added a generous and richly varied selection of new and previously unpublished work. Christopher Wiseman demonstrates here, with great authority, a strong and impressive humanity, deep feeling, a total command of both free and formal verse, an ability to celebrate the seemingly ordinary and turn it into something unforgettable, even luminous, and a startlingly wide range of subject, tone and approach. The poems collected here from some forty years of writing move around Europe, Britain, Canada and the United States, and range from the comic to the satirical to the reflective to the elegiac, but never lose what the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Donald Justice has called Wiseman's `strong, clear, truth-telling voice'. Don Coles admires the poems for being `subtle and tender', and throughout these warm, human and accessible works, the over-riding quality is one of honest, recognizable, but distinctive emotion, as the poems, brilliantly crafted and shaped, delight and deepen our sense of personal possibility, of the joy, laughter, sorrow and grief which will send the reader back over and over again to its warm and wise pages. Printed offset by Tim Inkster on the Heidelberg KORD at the printing office of the Porcupine's Quill in the Village of Erin, Wellington County, Ontario, Canada. Smyth sewn into 16-page signatures, with hand-tipped endleaves front and back. Seller Inventory # 9780889842731