A quarter of a century old and youthful still, Brick Books offers this selection, as inclusive as we could make it, of the writers we have published through the years. Most of these writers are poets, since Brick Books specializes in poetry, but we're pleased to flavour the mix with other forms like the historical prose of Greg Curnoe's Deeds/Abstracts and the terpsichorean prose of Michael Ondaatje in Elimination Dance/La danse éliminatoire. If we do say so ourselves, New Life From Dark Seas is much more than the souvenir of a significant anniversary. It's a feast for passionate poetry readers like the editors, those who like to stretch within and across the genre -- from P.K. Page's strict-form Holograms, to Dennis Lee's free jazz verse in Riffs, to Michael Kenyon's prose-poem fiction, Rack of Lamb, to Phil Hall's leaping language /work poems, to ... this could go on. Let it go on, dear reader, in you.
About the Author: Stan Dragland was born and brought up in Alberta. He was educated at The University of Alberta and Queen's University. He has taught at the University of Alberta, at The Grammar School, Sudbury, Suffolk, England, in the English Department at the University of Western Ontario in London, and in the Banff Centre Writing Studio. He now lives in St. John's, Newfoundland. He was founding editor of Brick, a journal of reviews and founder of Brick Books, a poetry publishing house, which he still serves as publisher and editor. Between 1993 and 1996 he was poetry editor for McClelland and Stewart. He has published three previous books of fiction: Peckertracks, a Chronicle (shortlisted for the 1978 Books in Canada First Novel Prize), Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages, and (for children) Simon Jesse's Journey. He has edited collections of essays on Duncan Campbell Scott and James Reaney. Wilson MacDonald's Western Tour, a 'critical collage, ' has been followed by two other books of criticism, The Bees of the Invisible: Essays in Contemporary English Canadian Writing and Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9, which won the 1995 Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Literary Criticism. 12 Bars, a prose blues, was co-winner of the bp Nichol Chapbook Award in 2003, the same year Apocrypha: Further Journeys appeared in NeWest Press's Writer-as-Critic series. Apocrypha was winner of the Rogers Cable Non-Fiction Award in 2005. In April 2004 the stage adaptation of Halldór Laxness's The Atom Station, co-written with Agnes Walsh, was performed at the LSPU Hall in St. John's. His most recent book is Stormy Weather: Foursomes, prose poetry from Pedlar Press, was shortlisted for the EJ Pratt Poetry Award in 2007. He is editor of the recently-released Hard-Headed and Big-Hearted: Writing Newfoundland, a collection of essays by Newfoundland historian Stuart Pierson.
