From Room to Room: The Poetry of Eli Mandel(Laurier Poetry)

The career of Eli Mandel (1922-1992) was one of the most prolific and distinguished in all of Canadian literature, yet in recent years his work has gone unsung compared with that of such peers as Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Robert Kroetsch, Irving Layton, and P.K. Page. Though he was a critic, anthologist, and editor of national prominence, Mandel's legacy resides most securely in his poetry, which earned many accolades. From Room to Room: The Poetry of Eli Mandel presents thirty-five of Mandel's best poems written over four decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s. The selection covers the most prominent themes in Mandel's work, including his Russian-Jewish heritage, his Saskatchewan upbringing, his interest in classical and biblical archetypes, and his concern for the political and social issues of his time. The book also highlights the way in which Mandel's work bridged the formal attributes of modernist poetry with contemporary, sometimes experimental, poetics. Complete with a scholarly introduction by Peter Webb and a literary afterword by Andrew Stubbs, From Room to Room makes a worthy addition to the Laurier Poetry Series, which presents affordable editions of contemporary Canadian poetry for use in the classroom and the enjoyment of anyone wishing to read some of the finest poetry Canada has to offer.

Table of Contents:
From Room to Room: The Poetry of Eli Mandel, selected with an introduction by Peter Webb Foreword Neil Besner Biographical Note Introduction Peter Webb Minotaur Poems Estevan Saskatchewan The Fire Place In the Caves of My City City Park Merry-Go-Round Doll on the Mantelpiece Epilogue Mary Midnight's Prologue Charles Isaac Mandel David Hippolytus The Meaning of the I CHING Girl on a High Wire Houdini The Madness of Our Polity The Speaking Earth From the North Saskatchewan Two Dream Songs for John Berryman On the 25th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz Room XV On the Renewal of Bombing in VietNam December, 1972 Envoi from Out of Place the return signs doors of perception near Hirsch a Jewish cemetery STRIKE sept 1931 estevan, 1934 petroglyphs at st victor the doppelganger Pictures in an Institution On the Murder of Salvador Allende The Madwomen of the Plaza de Mayo In My 57th Year Zenith: Saving to Disk Afterword Andrew Stubbs Acknowledgements

About the Author :
Eli Mandel was a renowned Canadian poet, critic, editor, and anthologist for over three decades beginning in the 1950s. Born in Estevan, Saskatchewan, he taught for many years at York University. His many books included ten poetry monographs or collections, including An Idiot Joy, which won the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1967. Peter Webb is a lecturer in Canadian literature at McGill University. He has published journal and book articles on Sara Jeannette Duncan, Timothy Findley, and Tom Thomson, and is writing a book-length study of war fiction entitled Shattered Lines: War in the Canadian Novel. He is a co-applicant member of the Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC) research group. Andrew Stubbs teaches composition and rhetoric at the University of Regina. He edited Rhetoric, Uncertainty, and the University as Text and co-edited The Other Harmony: The Collected Poetry of Eli Mandel, which followed his book-length study of Mandel's poetry and poetics, Myth, Origins, Magic. He has taught at universities in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Review :
``The book cover ... The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli -- brilliantly evokes Mandel's attraction to the macabre, the Gothic, the tantalizingly irrational and the subterranean.... And the selection of poems, drawn judiciously from Mandel's earliest collection to his final unpublished verse, ably demonstrates Mandel's range of interests and his mastery of conventional as well as experimental forms. They also show his inexhaustible fascination with the suppleness of words, the wild interplay of madness and reason, the sage contortions of meaning in our subconscious and the need to speak politically.'' -- Michael Higgins -- Telegraph-Journal (St. John, NB), March 12, 2011, 201103