Whylah Falls - Softcover

George Elliott Clarke

Softcover

ISBN 10: 189609550X ISBN 13: 9781896095509

Publisher: Raincoast Books, Polestar, 2001

Synopsis

The mythic community created within these poems is populated with larger-than-life characters: lovers, murderers, musicians, and muses. Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry, Whylah Falls has inspired a drama, a stage play, and a feature film, One Heart Broken into Song. This Tenth Anniversary Edition includes "Apocrypha" - a section of previously unpublished poems - and an introduction by Clarke.

About this title

From the Author:

"[T]o be from the Maritimes is to be, in terms of the imagination, from a different country. One is a Nova Scotian, always, no matter where one is, just as a Jamaican, migrated and settled in Toronto, may still feel, must still feel, Jamaican. I may have left the Maritimes, but the Maritimes is as much a part of me as the proverbial salt — sea salt — in our blood." (2011-10-17)

From the Inside Flap:

Set in a mythic village in the heart of Black Nova Scotia, Whylah Falls is a sensuous blues spiritual pulsating with earthy folk wisdom and racial injustice. When a wayward poet returns to this "snowy northern Mississippi" in the 1930s, his passion for a local girl triggers a series of events that shakes the community to its Black Loyalist roots.

With a jazz-influenced original score by Joe Seely, George Elliott Clarke's hip dramatization of his award-winning verse novel features magnetic performances by Walter Borden, Troy Adams, and Merlita Williams.

About this edition

• Publisher: Raincoast Books, Polestar
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 189609550X
• ISBN 13: 9781896095509
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240