The publication of Anne Compton's first two collections marked the arrival of a major voice in Canadian poetry. In this, her third collection, she completes the island trilogy that those two books began, bringing her long, narrative lines into focus on the mysterious metaphysical nature of everyday life, family and literature. Spirit-haunted yet critical, Compton is intermediary here in a complex poetic argument, over which she presides with a confidence ruled by passionate intellect.
Reviews:
"Compton shows an allegiance to the classics in the rhythmic cadences of her lines, her deft metaphors based on the natural world and in her attention to time-honoured subjects such as love and mortality. She's a cultivated writer, but there's a seam of the down-to-earth under her fingernails, too. She hasn't lost touch with the land (and sea) of her P.E.I. upbringing."
-- The Toronto Star
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Anne Compton was awarded the 2006 Governor General's Award for Poetry for Processional, which also won the Atlantic Poetry Prize. Her first collection, Opening the Island, won the 2004 Atlantic Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award. More recently she was awarded the Alden Nowlan Award for excellence in English language literary arts, presented by the New Brunswick Arts Board.
Anne is author of A.J.M. Smith: Canadian Metaphysical and Meetings with Maritime Poets: Interviews, editor of The Edge of Home: Milton Acorn from the Island, and co-editor of Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada. She teaches at the University of New Brunswick at Saint John.
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