Ed Bartram Livres

In her haunting fourth collection, National Poetry Series winner Joan Murray takes the challenge of performing poetry's original and still necessary tasks in the uncertain landscape of a new millennium.Widely praised for the exceptional humanity and technical virtuosity of her earlier collections, Murray now explores the daily struggles of life and death in the natural world, the hidden pleasures and ironies of life in small-town America, the vulnerable underside of artistic communities, and the myriad complexities that pervade our dreams and relationships in this new century. With wit, generosity, and unflinching honesty, Murray gives us poems that mourn and praise, illuminate and challenge.

An illustrated introduction to the life and work of the leader of the Group of Seven.

Here in his own words, is why artist Ed Bartram paints with the geological exactitude and passion that have made his artwork famous. Ed Bartram, printmaker, photographer and painter, has a special vision of Georgian Bay that has captivated his imagination for over half a century. Since the early 1970s he has transformed this vision into a series of graphic images that reflect the land and particularly the rock face of this region of Canada's Precambrian Shield; works that are powerfully and often luxuriously physical, but have an abstract dimension with richly colored and textured surfaces. In finding his own interpretation of the "Thirty Thousand Island" landscape made iconic by the Group of Seven, he has had to display great ingenuity in finding a new theme in the old. His work reminds us, in a forceful way, of the unique power of the area, even before it was held up for serious consideration in a work of art. Bartram writes of his own work: "Rather than using the traditional landscape composition of the Group of Seven, I often take a more intimate viewpoint where the rock surface itself becomes the subject of the work of art. Within the structure of the rock, I find patterns which become abstract landscapes themselves and capture the essence of the windswept north."

The first appearance of this award-winning writer's work since the 1940s, this collection, which includes an introduction by John Ashbery, restores Joan Murray's striking poetry to its originally intended form. Though John Ashbery hailed Joan Murray as a key influence on his work, Murray’s sole collection, Poems, published after her death at the early age of twenty-four and selected by W. H. Auden for inclusion in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, has been almost entirely unavailable for the better part of half a century. Poems was put together by Grant Code, a close friend of Murray’s mother, and when Murray’s papers, long thought to be lost, reappeared in 2013, it became clear that Code had exercised a heavy editorial hand. This new collection, edited by Farnoosh Fathi from Murray’s original manuscripts, restores Murray’s raw lyricism and visionary lines, while also including a good deal of previously unpublished work, as well as a selection of her exuberant letters.