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DC
Reid’s Poems Selected and New charts the poet’s evolution through
selections from eight previous books including The Women Who Surround
Me, The Hunger and What It Means to Be Human (Ekstasis Editions).
Raised south of Calgary, Reid initially explored Prairie Realism with
W.O. MItchell at the Banff School of Fine Arts, until poet Eli Mandel
suggested another path. Reid continues to experiment with new approaches
while retaining the honest appraisal and restrained emotion suggestive
of the landscape of his youth. Through the joy of love and the pain of
separation, the practise of poetry enshrines memory and mitigates despair
while structuring experience for a heightening of the ordinary. Birth,
life, art, death and sex are themes revisited in various forms including
glosas based on Rilke’s Duino Elegies and PK Page’s hologram. Reid’s new
poems celebrate western landscapes and the environment of his home in
Victoria, BC as well as seminal Canadian poets Page, Atwood and Purdy.
Some humourous and others experimental, the entire collection stands as
a testament to a poet who continues to probe beneath the surface of human
existence to capture a significant place in the art of a northern nation.
This has been said of DC Reid’s books:
Reid has made a breakthrough that is rare.
~ Patrick Lane
[Reid’s work is] honest, lyrical hard hitting, even shocking… It takes
the ordinary and explodes it in your face. This is poetry about women
drenched in admiration and sexuality.
~ Vancouver Sun
DC Reid has, with passion and immense skill, created a compelling new
poetic form. Intensely self-aware, each poem moves with the in and out-breath
of existential examination. Sensual and intelligent, DC Reid’s work ignites
inquiry and prods the reader to move to the spaces between the defined
and the definition. This collection is at once, challenging, startling,
and intimate
~ Dale Winslow
DC Reid’s poems have been published widely in 50 literary magazines in
Canada and he is the author of 16 books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction.
Reid has a deep and divergent interest in many subjects, including poetry,
novels, cutting-edge brain science and neuroplasticity, the science of
artistic creativity, sports-fishing non-fiction and creative non-fiction
and the environmental degradation caused by fish farms. He lives in Victoria
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