Reviews

Guernica Editions’ Writers Series

Michael Hayward

Guernica Editions’ Writers Series was started in the year 2000, and to date twenty-two Canadian writers have been profiled, P.K. Page, Alistair MacLeod and Don McKay among them. Each volume is “edited by a guest editor, and contains an introduction; 5 or 6 essays by different critics, scholars, and fellow writers; an in-depth interview; as well as complete biobibliographical [sic] notes.” As such, these are the books of fall rather than the books of summer, aimed at students of Canadian literature wherever they are to be found. I can picture (and sympathize with) those hard-working students, who by now recall August’s beach reading rather wistfully as they attempt to parse sentences such as the pair that open the essay by William Anselmi on Mary Melfi’s poetry (series volume 22): “Attention must be given to what is a way of recuperating, through a momentary detachment, displacement. Of course, the silence between the linear discourse and the unique moment of reflective mode, the parenthesis, erupts unscathed from each presentation.” (To which this reviewer can only erupt “Of course!”—in a reflective, parenthetical aside.)

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