Kurgan

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The Porcupine's Quill, 2000 - Poetry - 85 pages

`Most of all, it is Coles's mastery of syntax, sinuous and unpredictable, that brings his poems alive. The trademark hesitations, asides and parentheses that mark his lines derive from speech (a Hemingway wife is ``one of the specialty, I am/going to risk saying, dishes in the big man's/moveable feast'') and are all measured out and weighed in beautifully constructed sentences. They reflect, I will risk saying, a radical skepticism: ``Nothing/here doubts itself, from which it follows/there is not a hint of me here, '' he tells us. This doubt, perhaps Coles's most modern trait, runs through and enriches all of Kurgan (as it did his great book-length poem Little Bird) and places his poetry among the very best being written in English.'

- Richard Sanger - Globe & Mai
 

Contents

Kurgan
9
Gone Out Is Part of Sanity
18
Knights of the Round Table
27
Hector Alone
33
Flowers in an Odd Time
43
Reading a Biography of Samuel Beckett
51
Botanical Gardens 53
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About the author (2000)

Donald Coles was born in Woodstock, Ontario, Canada on April 12, 1927. He received a bachelor's degree in history and a master's in English from the University of Toronto. After graduating, he studied at Cambridge and spent most of the 1950s studying, writing, and working as a translator in Europe. He moved to Toronto in 1965 and taught in the humanities and creative writing programs at York University. He retired in 1995. He wrote 14 volumes of poetry including The Prinzhorn Collection; Forests of the Medieval World, which won the Governor-General's literary award for poetry in 1993; and Kurgan, which won the Trillium Prize in 2000. He also wrote a novel entitled Doctor Bloom's Story. He died on November 29, 2017 at the age of 90.

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