The Porcupine's Quill

In The Essential Eugene McNamara, poetry pushes the barriers of language and grammar, daring to convey raw emotion with disarming empathy.

A collection of the poetic achievements of John Glassco, a Montreal Group poet whose technical giftedness and unimpeachable wordplay brought music and flair to poems characterized by darkness and decay.

In The Essential Elizabeth Brewster, questioning, conversational poetry melds the private and the collective, exploring the challenges of constructing selfhood and voicing historically silenced female perspectives.

Thematic consistency and technical inventiveness shine in this selection of Derk Wynand's emotionally intelligent poetry.

Light and shadows clash in The Essential Kay Smith, a collection that demonstrates an early modernist poet’s attempts to reconcile faith, imagination, reality and being.

The Essential Douglas LePan presents a wide-ranging collection of poetry—from tense verses on the fog of war to homoerotic love poems to lyrics in praise of the natural world, all in celebration of the heart’s blood ‘that runs through and supports everything mankind has made’.

The Essential Charles Bruce explores the clear, direct verse and vernacular imagination of Maritime poet Charles Bruce, whose practical, no-nonsense lyrics audaciously eschewed the trappings of modernist poetry.

Brimming with powerful imagery and quiet but strong emotion, The Essential Dorothy Roberts gathers together a selection of the best poems from Fredericton-born poet Dorothy Roberts’s six-decades-long career.

‘The Essential John Reibetanz provides a compelling view of the work of a deeply engaged poet whose exploratory syntax and probing imagery come together to form intense meditations on the nature of community and the transfigurative power of the imagination.’

‘I was delighted by this collection and by the discovery of a clever and witty poet whose style reminds me in some ways of the arch humour of Margaret Atwood.’

—The Indextrious Reader

‘Jim Johnstone’s very judicious selection of poems from Jones’s nine collections teaches us much about the poet apart from his lifelong grounding in nature.’

—Bruce Whiteman, Canadian Notes & Queries

‘At their best, these poems reveal the complex drama between a wild earth and its inhabitants, folding history and memory into meticulous scenes.’

—Karen Rigby, Foreword Reviews

‘This latest addition to The Porcupine Quill's series of Essential Poets ... reenforced for me the importance of Hine as an alternative voice in an era with too little appreciation for the history and the possibilities of formal poetry. It is here, I think, that the value of this volume and of Hine's legacy as a whole truly lies, in its potential to provoke a new generation of Canadian writers to engage and renew the tradition of poetry.’

—Jeremy Luke Hill, From Word to Word

‘The strength of The Essential Anne Wilkinson is its editor's ability to distil the best examples of Wilkinson's ludic humour, polished lines, intimate voice, wide-ranging allusion, and ability without sacrificing the reader's immersion into a mythic, green world that is both rich and strange. Ruthig's collection is an excellent introduction to the work of a gifted and often forgotten poet....’

—Melissa Dalgleish, The Bull Calf

‘The tropes that appear in Birney's poetry are both quietly political and overtly sincere, experimental and traditionally sound. It isn’t an easy feat for a poet to develop and change as he did, and if his work is to survive and be collected, it should be acknowledged as living.’

—Kenny Jakubas, Foreword Reviews

‘Over the two decades since Tom Marshall passed away, his poetry has become increasingly hard to find. The publication of The Essential Tom Marshall is a welcome corrective, restoring to us the poet's best work and also, in some ways, the man himself: psychic mariner, elemental lyricist, interpreter of the silences of fire, author of neglected small masterpieces.... ’

—Steven Heighton, author of Every Lost Country

‘A prize-winning poet himself, Bartlett presents Gibbs as a metaphysical poet with earthy touches, with a ken for the dense, intense nature scrutiny of British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and as one who is kin to U.S.-U.K. egghead T.S. Eliot and homeboy bard Alden Nowlan.’

—George Elliott Clarke, The Chronicle Herald

‘In her selections from the late Ontario poet Richard Outram's more than 40-year career, Amanda Jernigan has crafted a mixtape of his poetry. Like any cherished mixtape, Jernigan's selection allows for her own expression while also leaving her recipient's own interpretation free to develop. ’

—Telegraph-Journal

‘Richly imagistic and occasionally colloquial, particularly in the later poems, echoes of Eliot's foe William Carlos Williams may also be heard.... One thing is certain, no matter the reader's religious persuasion, there are riches to be had for whoever devotes time to The Essential Margaret Avison.’

—Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, ForeWord Magazine

‘Few would disagree, if pressed, that the word “essential” is overused. That's not the case with this book.... [T]he poems in this book, selected by Brian Bartlett, demonstrate a singular strength and vision that, but for the lack of a wider readership, almost certainly would have earned him a place as a widely known and respected 20th Century Canadian poet.’

—Dan Coffey, ForeWord Magazine

‘The Essential Kenneth Leslie edited by Zachariah Wells, returns to us a unique and wily versifier who was a major element of Canadian poetry in the 1930s, but who is all but forgotten today.... It is good to have these poems back in print.’

—Paul Vermeersch, OpenBook Toronto

‘[The Essential P. K. Page is] a reprieve to hold in one's hand a compact 60 pages featuring the most memorable, most confounding, most rereadable poems written by Page, arranged alphabetically—each allowed its own space, unencumbered by time or category.’

—Anita Lahey, The Malahat Review

‘Robyn Sarah's The Essential George Johnston offers a first-rate introduction to Johnston's poems through a condensed and careful collection of finely-honed rhythms and images. These poems are traditional and original, crafted and self-consciously unstable. Expressing an epistemology of post-Einsteinian timelessness, the formal lines are subtle, truthful, and profound.’

—Monika Lee, Canadian Literature