The essays in this book elaborate an overall view of the central predicament confronting the West today: a theologically-inspired terrorist movement, the left-liberal belief-system that dominates the Western sensibility, the plague of political correctness that devitalizes language and obscures truth, and the almost universal opprobrium in which America—and by extrapolation the historical endowment of Western civilization—is held by the official institutions of the international community and by liberal culture. For too many years now we have practiced the rites of evasion, craving asylum in blindness, conciliation, sophistry and equivocation. Many flinch from expressing their convictions plainly, fearing to offend their readers and imperil their professional credentials. There is no more pressing requirement for us today than the obligation to seek the truth and to speak clearly, boldly, and without compromise, an endeavor with which this book is fundamentally engaged.
Solway argues in this feisty and polemical book that the time has arrived to take stock and engage passionately with our literature, and especially our poetry, if it is ever to be rescued from the swamp of second-ratedness into which it has descended. He contends that almost all of the poetry (and much of the fiction) being written in Canada these days is turgid, spurious and pedestrian, the result of two highly questionable developments: the proliferation of Creative Writing departments in universities throughout the country, and a largely subsidized literature industry, abetted by a press of cousinly critics and reviewers, intended to construct a patchwork national psyche, create a sense of ideological cohesion and glorify the tribe. In consequence of this we have sponsored a coterie of underachieving overproducers and proceeded to collude in their diffusion by virtue of our silent complicity or our chauvinism. Solway believes that we are on the whole far too nice, far too politically correct and, in a word, far too `Canadian', to register our disapproval bluntly and agonistically. The last thing we want to do is offend anyone. But all that such manoeuvres ensure is that nothing changes while conscience is appeased. There comes a time when diffidence and affability, those specifically Canadian virtues, work against our best interests and prevent the candid and occasionally brutal assessments without which the critical stupor and aesthetic fog so congenial to us must remain destructively in place. In Director's Cut,Solway attempts to dispel that fog, to see clearly and to speak directly to a readership that has been far too receptive of questionable work.
David Solway's new collection of poems is a profound and witty work by a grandmaster of English verse. In forms ranging from free verse to strict quatrains to sly "translations," the poems in Chess Pieces display an astonishing formal skill. These are poems of wit, elegance, and humour but, more darkly, they are also explorations of the play of power as enacted in the game of chess.
The Properties of Things continues David Solway's explorations in the realm of fictive translation, this time that of the obscure thirteenth century scholar Bartolomaeus Anglicus. The result is a poetic alphabetary, ranging from the bawdy to the sublime. David Solway has been called "an internationalist of the imagination." He remains one of the country's most brilliant and inventive poets.
David Solway's The Turtle Hypodermic of Sickenpods is an eye-opening polemic against technology in the classroom and pedagogical theory as furthered by current administrative policy. He dissects the way computers have affected the learning process and students' ability to understand material presented to them in books.
Between 1733 and 1735 William Hogarth produced a series of paintings and engravings under the title of "A Rake's Progress" which became perhaps his best known and most admired work. In this sequence he told a story of a young parvenu who, having inherited a fortune, resolves to emulate the stereotypical profligate and arranges his life according to the standard formula. When the dust settles we are left with a cautionary tale curiously neutralized, to some extent, by an extraordinary profusion of choreographic detail and an astonishing technical virtuosity, compelling delight and approval (or possibly resistance) in the aesthetic rather than the moral dimension. Motivated by Hogarth's example, David Solway tells the story of a representative figure, a lover, of our own anarchic era which is in some ways very similar to the dissolute and ostentatious period the painter anatomized. Solway has equipped the lover with a sketchy CV: he is an inveterate traveller -- or perhaps cruiser' is a better word -- and diarist with an introspective bent, but he is also a confirmed voluptuary prone to distraction and not without a streak of coarseness in his nature. Illustrations detailing critical moments in the lover's career have been contributed by renowned Montr?al artist Marion Wagschal.
They must have decided/to return to the ship /despite the flaming sword /of the never-setting, the dark sword/of the never-rising, sun./Same old story./The way back into the garden/is also the wayinto the realm of the minerals./In the end/what we are looking for/will find us./"Living must be your whole occupation,"/the poet wrote. He got it right./No, he got it half right.Based upon the various conflicting accounts of John Franklin's calamitous attempt to complete and map the Northwest Passage, Franklin's Passage takes as its starting point a series of rhetorical questions posed by Henry David Thoreau in Walden: "Is not our own interior white on the chart? Is it a North-West passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost?" David Solway explores the concepts of narrative, parable, and allegory, treating the failed Expedition as an unfolding text in which the human adventure is subsumed and recorded, introducing the Expedition as a mirror in which the soul may see itself.
The first section of the book develops Solway's approach to literature, starting from the assumption that genuine criticism requires the intellectual freedom to range at will across the literary landscape rather than restricting one's direction based on what is current, fashionable, or politically correct. Solway argues that advocating a theoretical school - postmodernism, poststructuralism, semiotics, new historicism, Marxist revisionism, or queer theory - generally involves abandoning the real critical project, which is the discovery of one's own undetermined motives, dispositions, and interests as reflected in the secret mirrors embedded in literary texts. Instead Solway pursues what he calls elective criticism, writing that enables the critical writer to freely discover his or her own identity - a concept that he claims cannot reasonably be diluted, relinquished, or deconstructed. In the second section Solway practices what he preaches, exploring a wide range of authors and subjects. His essays include an analysis of Franz Kafka's The Trial as a Jewish joke, a personal memoir of Irving Layton, an interpretation of Erin Moure's "Pronouns on the Main," an examination of language in William Shakespeare's romances, a reading of Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" that is sympathetic to the Duke, an assertion that James Joyce has more in common with the traditional novelist than with the professional, (post-)modern alienator, and an exploration of Jonathan Swift's sartorial imagery that contends that form is the source of substantive identity.
Addressing some of the major issues plaguing education, particularly the scandal of illiteracy and the growing mediocrity in academic performance, David Solway argues that the current state of affairs in education is the result not simply of poor training in elementary school or the disappearance of grammatical study from the overall curriculum but of a larger cultural problem.
The science is settled" has become both a mantra for political activists who believe in man-made global warming and a club to beat down anyone who opposes their anti-industrial, anti-capitalism agenda. But is it true? Solway presents the "science" in a style suited to the average citizen who wants nothing more than to learn the truth.
the language of the waterway / the name / the train's route through bliss / to" When the poet and novelist David Helwig - a recipient of the Matt Cohen Prize for lifetime achievement and a member of the Order of Canada - died in October 2018, he left behind a substantial catalogue of unpublished work. A House in Memory, a selection of Helwig's last poems, was assembled by his daughter, Maggie. It shows an author still at the height of his powers, creating work in complex formal structures, contemplating mortality, memory, and the landscape of his adopted home of Prince Edward Island, and paying tribute to his literary predecessors. The collection also includes unpublished poems from earlier in Helwig's career. Ranging widely through time, space, and literary tradition, A House in Memory features some deeply personal poems. As Maggie Helwig says of her father, "he could not cease to be a poet as long as he had breath in this world.
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