Poems Twice Told

This volume brings together two collections - one well known but unavailable for some time, the other little known - by a distinguished Canadian poet. The Boatman, first published in 1957, was one of the outstanding poetry collections of the 1950s and the winner of a Governor General’s Award. It is an intricate sequence of short epigrammatic poems - in which there are echoes of ballads, carols, nursery rhymes, and hymns - that bear a whole cosmos of the poet’s invention, constructed from Biblical and classical allusions. Welcoming Disaster was privately published in 1974 and will now reach the wider audience it deserves. Reviewing it in Poetry (January 1976), David Bromwich referred to Jay Macpherson’s ‘grandness’ and ‘verve’, and wrote: ‘She will put readers in mind of Graves and Wordsworth, of Auden and Dickinson and Stevie Smith, of every poet who ever wrote truly about innocence and its unlucky master, love.