Daniel O’Leary’s new collection of dramatic poems combines scholarly recovery of early Canadian visionary experience and new translations of early French-Canadian poems and documents, to create a seri
Daniel O’Leary’s new collection of dramatic poems combines scholarly recovery of early Canadian visionary experience and new translations of early French-Canadian poems and documents, to create a series of dramatic settings presenting a revived Canadian poetic ethos. In The Lower Provinces, O’Leary rejects the notion that Canada lacks a deep and visionary culture, or that the country’s commercial colonization by American financial interests is too far advanced to be resisted. Instead he presents an imaginative, frequently humourous cast of early Canadian voices who reflect as much on our own as on previous times. In both visionary recovery and faux antique pastiche, O’Leary examines the claims of the present and calls for a deeper appreciation of the insight welling up from Canada’s past.
Professor of Canadian Studies at Concordia in Montreal, Daniel O’Leary’s poetry has appeared in Exile, Fiddlehead, the spoken-word anthology Poetry Nation, and in numerous other journals. Aside from an earlier book of poetry, The Sorcerer of Les Trois Frères, he has published work on early Canadian print culture in The History of the Book in Canada and is co-editor with Jonathan Wisenthal of What Shaw Really Wrote About the War. A descendant of early Maritime Canadian families, O’Leary was born on New Brunswick’s Fundy coast and was raised there and in Nova Scotia.
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