In John Updike's Room: New and Selected Poems - Softcover

Wiseman, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889842736 ISBN 13: 9780889842731

Publisher: Porcupine's Quill, 2005

Synopsis

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 Here Wiseman collects his best work, alongside a section of new and previously unpublished poetry.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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

`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)

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Porcupine's Quill
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0889842736
• ISBN 13: 9780889842731
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224