Archive for Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay

Above all
a poem records speech:
the way it was said
between people animals birds
a poem is an archive for our times
-Dorothy Livesay, "Anything Goes"

Dorothy Livesay, who died in 1996, is considered a pioneer of Canadian poetry; her work is infused with an extraordinary grace and power, and shaped by a prescient feminist sensibility which led her to be called "a voice of women." She published more than 25 books of poetry and prose, as well as an autobiography in 1991. She is regarded as a major influence for many writers, not only for her poetry but for the remarkable way in which she lived her life.

Archive for Our Times is a major undertaking: a collection of poems by Dorothy Livesay never before published, discovered in her archives and published in this volume with the blessings of the Livesay estate. The collection is a compelling record of Livesay's poetic, and a revealing and intimate portrayal of the writing life. As Livesay herself wrote in the poem "Memo to My Daughter," "The record of our life--is lived in secret--inside the head." With this in mind, Archive for Our Times is a gift: a rare opportunity to experience the feral beauty of the poetry of Dorothy Livesay.

― arsenalpulp.com

Dorothy Livesay was a legendary Canadian poet. She passed away in 1996.

Dean Irvine is an associate professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University and director of the SSHRC-funded Editing Modernism in Canada project. He is the author of Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916-1956 (University of Toronto Press, 2008), and editor of Archive for Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay (Arsenal Pulp, 1998), Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1924-61 (Vehicule, 2003), and The Canadian Modernists Meet (University of Ottawa Press, 2005). His forthcoming work includes a new monograph, Variant Readings: Editing Canadian Literature in English, under contract to McGill-Queen's University Press, and a two-volume critical edition, co-edited with Robert G. May, of F.R. Scott's complete poems and translations. He is a general editor, with Zailig Pollock and Sandra Djwa, of the multivolume print edition and digital archive of the collected works of P.K. Page and the director and English-language general editor of the University of Ottawa Press's Canadian Literature Collection/Collection de littérature canadienne.