The Boy's Alphabet Book     Ian Hamilton Finlay
Dave Paterson, Illustrator
Visual     60 pp     8 1/2 x 9     0 88910 030 6 pb
    The Boy's Alphabet Book is one of the lengthiest works to date by the internationally renowned poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. The extended form of the traditional primer allows full range for the demonstration of Finlay's abilities as craftsman, toymaker and word-shaper. Illustrated with photographs by Dave Paterson.

Carnival ... the second panel     Steve McCaffery
Poetry     20 pp     8 1/2 x 11     0 88910 061 6 pb
    Panel 2 of Carniva1 continues the groundbreaking work of Panel 1. Moving out into the hand-stamped, hand-drawn and xeroxed elements, McCaffery's interior language has also deepened and tightened. Panel 1 was received with great excitement in international poetry circles when it first appeared. It was chosen as the centrepiece for an exhibition of typewriter art (covering the last hundred years) in Edinburgh and included in other exhibitions in Bologna, Italy and Toronto. Panel 2 only added to McCaffery's reputation as a language innovator.

Corbenic     Edward Strickland
Poetry     32 pp     4 1/2 x 7 1/8     0 88910 106 x pb
    Corbenic is the old Welsh name for the grail castle, meaning literally 'sacred horn,' or the 'horn of plenty,' in Celtic belief, the source of all life. In Corbenic Edward Strickland returns to Malory's The Book of Arthur and relates what happened after the end of Malory's narrative. With Arthur dead, the temporal thread fails; all histories within the sacred horn become co-present. His knights wander to their fates in Africa, Antarctica, a freak show in twentieth-century North America. Tense and surreal, this apocalyptic book exhilarates by transforming Arthur's lost knights into our own contemporaries.

The Cradle Will Fall     Jan Bartley
Poetry     32 pp     4 1/2 x 7 1/8     0 88910 041 1 pb
    It is rare that a young poet greets her first audience already totally articulate. In Jan Bartley's first book, The Cradle Will Fall, each unit of language is precise, fully charged, and acts immediately to evoke the world of her vision. The range of Bartley's work is also impressive - love, Canadian history, Arthurian romance and childhood, blended here with a Bergman-like clarity.
    Jan Bartley is the author of a soon-to-be-published study of Gwendolyn MacEwen and is currently writing a book on John Newlove.

Criss-Cross     John Riddell
Fiction     174 pp     5 x 8     0 88910 025 x pb
    The first collection of the startling, witty and innovative fiction of John Riddell, (author of A Hole in the Head, Transitions and W.A.R. ranges wildly from the concrete lyricism of 'The Space where Love should be' to the speculative mode of 'The Ramp.'
    'Riddell's narratives are straightforward, however unconventional their presentation, and few repeat their forms ... "Break," with illiteracies and indeterminate margins, is about a rural family with touches of Faulknerian grotesquerie, country gothic; the mutual decay of the land and its inhabitants is mirrored in the irregular prose forms, grouped in blocks, which often suggest verse ... "Morox" is shaped as a breaking and reforming wave of type, letters which cohere into words and ultimately syntax as the wave deepens into a black sediment of language, followed by the reverse process of dissociation ... "Process '76" is a palimpsest, type over handwriting on a series of coil binder pages. While the written material is college notes and, perhaps, the draft of a fiction, the type is a lyrical diary; the diarist searches his own history, redeeming the time, questioning the effect of love's not having its full say. Here the contrast of the formal and the personal is effectively conveyed by the form and degree of the kinds of writing, a subtle blend in which Riddell makes intriguing use of his material.' - Louis K. MacKendrick, Essays in Canadian Writing

The Fontainebleau Dream Machine     Roy Kiyooka
Poetry     60 pp     5 3/4 x 8 3/4     0 88910 027 6 pb
    ... it's a Weaving together / Shuttling back and forth of Divers / Stories a coolaging if you will & a part of the Weaving has to do with How the stories are woven right / ly or wrong / lie into the Cloth of our Language, our Rhetorick.
    Illustrated with eighteen collages by the author.
    'A complex delight.' - Northrop Frye

From Next Spring     Gerald Gilbert
Fiction     224 pp     4 1/4 x 6     0 88910 018 7 pb
    A real-time first-person narrative in which the breathtaking word-to-word agility that characterizes Gilbert's poetry courts the structural complexities of extended fiction. One is reminded of the pleasure of a long afternoon walk with a dear friend during which many things of deep importance were discussed with forgiving humour.
    'Gilbert's poet/persona is a bricoleur, building poems out of the leftover remnants of his culture, he is also a kind of Trickster figure, the jester/fool who gets away with more than is at first apparent. He is a trickster with language of course, dodging in and out of the linguistic landscape in which he finds himself ... to engage in banter with all codes and institutions that threaten to enforce their restraints upon him. What happens in the writing is interesting; we get all kinds of twists in the language, little shifts and reversals in syntax, malapropisms, graphemes that don't stay in place ... Gilbert isn't really the 'far-out' poet that everyone thinks he is. Instead he's in-close - and busy, busy, busy. Opening up the language.' - Nelson Gray, CV II

Lacerating Heartwood     Judith Fitzgerald
Poetry     96 pp     5 1/2 x 8 1/2     0 88910 007 1 pb
    Fitzgerald writes of the subdued violence of intimate relationships, in language and imagery vicious in their clarity and tightness.
    Illustrated with photographs by Barry Brooks.

The Martyrology Books I and II Second Ed.     bpNichol
Jerry Ofo, Illustrator
Poetry     240 pp     5 1/2 x 8 3/4     0 88910 017 9 pb
    'I see bpNichol's publication as part of poetry's catching-up process. Nichol has freed poetry from melody and meaning and levitated it above the printed page. He has brought it nearer both to music and painting by freeing it from what we used to think songs and pictures were.... bp is an important landmark in bringing the Canadian reader and writer into a closer, more creative collaboration.' - John Robert Colombo, Tamarack Review

Mrs. Dukes' Million     Wyndham Lewis
Fiction     368 pp     5 1/2 x 8 1/4     0 88910 082 9 pb
    An amazing book! A mystery novel, an art novel, a comic novel. Will the sly Raza Khan and his 'Actor-Gang' succeed in defrauding old Mrs. Dukes of her million-pound inheritance? Will true love survive the violence of gangland crime from which this love itself has sprung? All this in a sparklingly ironic style from the youthful pen of one of this century's master novelists - Canadian-born Wyndham Lewis.

My granddaughters are combing out their long hair     Colleen Thibaudeau
Poetry     104 pp     6 x 8 3/8     0 88910 060 8 pb
    A selection of the poetry of Colleen Thibaudeau written between the 1940s and the present. One of the most interesting and overlooked poets in the country. This collection will make readers aware of a distinct vision.
    Illustrated with cover and borders by Tony Urquhart.

The Poet's Progress     David McFadden
Poetry     64 pp     5 x 8 1/2     0 88910 006 3 pb
    The Poet's Progress is a moving record of the perennial struggle between corporeal denseness and the overwhelming intelligence of inspiration. The notion of human direction is submerged and another comes into play, the direction of the pre-natal heart.
    'David McFadden is a true post-modem poet ... He is the first poet since Blake to see fairies in his backyard.' - E.E. Greenglass, Canadian Literature Magazine.
    With cover drawing 'Bertie Comes Home' by Robert Fones.

Quince Jam     Jacques Ferron
Fiction     262 pp     4 1/4 x 8     0 88910 031 4 pb
Series: Coach House Quebec Translations
    'Ferron is a kind of Québécois Renaissance man: a practising medical doctor and frequently controversial humanist, and a nationalist. As a writer he specialises in close encounters of the fantastic kind.' - Gillian Davies, Brick
    This volume is the English equivalent of the 1971 Partipris edition including Les Confitures de Coing (Quince Jam) and three other texts: Papa Boss, the Appendix to Quince Jam, and Credit Due.
    Papa Boss stands apart as Ferron's sardonic vision of the annunciation of the new Messiah, son of Papa Boss, Lord of a firmament of high finance and technology, who will be born (of course) to a fallen nun in Quebec. The other works form a unit because they all deal with the problem of autonomy for Quebec and autonomy of the individual - the author's sense of his own identity in his uncertain country. They are the assertive statements of a man devoted to his culture, antidotes to the public self-mortification of so many texts of the 'quiet revolution.'
    'Quince Jam deserves the attention of all those interested in learning about contemporary Quebec from one of its more sensitive and articulate patriots.' - The Canadian Reader

Screens     Eugene McNamara. Paul Collins, Illustrator
Poetry     72 pp     5 1/2 x 8 1/2     0 88910 016 0 pb
    A powerful collection by the author of Salt and Diving for the Body. In Screens McNamara's inner and outer voices merge in powerful emotional statements of remembered and lived longing.

The Spiral Stair     John Bentley Mays
Fiction     200 pp     4 1/4 x 6 1/2     0 88910 019 5 pb
    In this first novel, John Bentley Mays has woven together memoirs and documents, oneiric and bitter narratives, tales of violence, lust and loss, and tatters of a legend and experience and exposition in order to create a chronicle of the ends of two men - the one damned by the lies he has taught himself, the other by the lies built into the pavement of his time and city, the nameless capital of the unreal, twentieth century. A difficult, lucid, compelling book.
    'Brilliant, sometimes confusing and highly disturbing fiction.' - Douglas Barbour, The Fiddlehead
    'No writer since Kafka has created so perfectly a logical fantastic universe for the isolation and comprehension of the component elements of the totalitarian state.' - The Varsity

Stabbed to Death with Artificial Respiration     Opal L. Nations
Fiction     32 pp     5 1/2 x 7 1/2     0 88910 028 4 pb
    A surrealist detective novel after Hans Arp, lavishly illustrated by Robert Amos.

Under the Thunder the Flowers Light up the Earth     D.G. Jones
Poetry     112 pp     5 1/2 x 8 3/4     0 88910 059 4 pb
    Well known as a critic for his brilliant study on Canadian literature, Butterfly on Rock, D.G. Jones shows in this work that he is one of the best and most enigmatic poets writing in Canada today. Winner of the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1978.

Wilson MacDonald's Western Tour, 1923-4     Stan Dragland
Criticism 128 pp     8 1/2 x 6     0 88910 170 1 pb
    This book is a collage of letters (to, from and about Wilson MacDonald), newspaper clippings, poems and drawings. A vivid and authentic record of a unique literary personality in action.
    'MacDonald's egotism is the theme underlying this delightful little book put together by Stan Dragland ... it is a sad and funny book, bringing MacDonald briefly back to life and bringing back, too, the literary Canada of half a century ago.' - Robert Fulford, Saturday Night

Zocalo     Daphne Marlatt
Fiction     104 pp     5 3/4 x 7 1/4     0 88910 057 8 pb
    A travel book about getting lost. A sequence of days and nights in the Yucatan. A Canadian couple, a woman travelling with her lover, Yoshio. Lost in the square, the zocalo, in the centre of town, reading a dream, reading the way the actual light falls - Mexico lies all around them.
    '... a beautiful and complex book ... Marlatt subtly traces a mind constantly engaged with other, the self and infinitely various methods by which they touch. There is so much happening in this fiction, not because Marlatt invents flashy events but because ordinary events are given complete attention and then fully articulated.' - Toronto Star