Almost Islands

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Almost Islands

Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten

By:

Stephen Collis

Format:

Paperback / softback

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Description

Almost Islands is a powerfully introspective memoir of the author’s friendship with legendary Canadian poet Phyllis Webb – now in her nineties and long enveloped in silence – and his regular trips to see her. It is an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and chance, location, colonization, and climate change – the struggle that is writing, and the end of writing. I go to see her because she is poetry’s old crone and I am seeking. I go to her – usually three, four times a year – because it is a small ministration I can perform for her, and for her poetry, as she slowly reaches into the finite – a long, slow embrace of nothing … If living is a process of learning how to die, then is writing a process of learning how to stop writing? I go in search of lost words, in search of the hoped-for defence against the loss of words, drawn to the shaping sounds of fate and mortality. is a book obsessed with the problem of Webb’s not writing, and the implications of this for a writer like Collis who, in his own words, may be writing “too much” – as well as the wider social, political, and world-historical implications of withdrawal, self-silencing, and not-doing.

Author Biography:

Stephen Collis’s many books of poetry include The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008; 2014), On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010 – awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), DECOMP (with Jordan Scott – Coach House, 2013), and Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks 2016 – nominated for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature). He has also written two books of literary criticism, a book of essays on the Occupy Movement, and a novel. Almost Islands is a forthcoming memoir, and a long poem, Sketch of a Poem I Will Not Have Written, is in progress. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

Release date Australia

December 6th, 2018

Author

Stephen Collis

Pages

256

Audience

General (US: Trade)

Dimensions

137x213x18

ISBN-13

9781772012071

Product ID

28432348

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Almost Islands

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