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The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields |
eBook Available
A critical edition of over 240 poems by Carol Shields.
Carol Shields, best known for her fiction writing, received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries. But she also wrote hundreds of poems over the span of her career.
The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging from the early 1970s to Shields’s death in 2003. In a detailed introduction and commentary, Nora Foster Stovel contextualizes these poems against the background of Shields’s life and oeuvre and the traditions of twentieth-century poetry. She demonstrates how poetry influenced and informed Shields’s novels; many of the poems, which constitute miniature narratives, illuminate Shields’s fiction and serve as the testing ground for metaphors she later employed in her prose works. Stovel delineates Shields’s career-long interest in character and setting, gender and class, self and other, actuality and numinousness, as well as revealing her subversive feminism, which became explicit in Reta Winter’s angry (unsent) letters in Unless and in the stories of poet Mary Swann and Daisy Goodwill in Swann and The Stone Diaries.
The first complete collection of her poetry, this volume is essential for all readers of Carol Shields. Stovel’s detailed annotations, based on research in the Carol Shields fonds at Library and Archives Canada, reveal the poems in all their depth and resonance, and the dignity and consequence they afford to ordinary people.
The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging from the early 1970s to Shields’s death in 2003. In a detailed introduction and commentary, Nora Foster Stovel contextualizes these poems against the background of Shields’s life and oeuvre and the traditions of twentieth-century poetry. She demonstrates how poetry influenced and informed Shields’s novels; many of the poems, which constitute miniature narratives, illuminate Shields’s fiction and serve as the testing ground for metaphors she later employed in her prose works. Stovel delineates Shields’s career-long interest in character and setting, gender and class, self and other, actuality and numinousness, as well as revealing her subversive feminism, which became explicit in Reta Winter’s angry (unsent) letters in Unless and in the stories of poet Mary Swann and Daisy Goodwill in Swann and The Stone Diaries.
The first complete collection of her poetry, this volume is essential for all readers of Carol Shields. Stovel’s detailed annotations, based on research in the Carol Shields fonds at Library and Archives Canada, reveal the poems in all their depth and resonance, and the dignity and consequence they afford to ordinary people.
Details
320 Pages, 6 x 9
ISBN 9780228008873
October 2021
Formats: Cloth, Paperback, eBook
"The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields will send Shields's followers back to her novels with a new understanding of their metaphoric and imagistic richness. Scholars and those familiar with her work will be grateful that the book has awakened them to another side of a writer of such renown." Lorna Crozier, University of Victoria and author of Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats)
"The poems in this book are witty, sparked by Shields's signature interests in gender, class, and the frames of subjectivity; they are smartly formal and, like her novels, often subversively feminist. It is intriguing to see the kind of breadth that Shields brought to multiple projects throughout her poetic practice and this book has the ring of a well-kept secret." Tanis MacDonald, Wilfrid Laurier University and author of Mobile
"[Shields's] last novel, Unless, of which I was the first informal editor, starts with an image she tried out in an early poem: “Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head.” We hear that pane laughing while she cleans it with her recipe for window cleaner, a little sugar a little vinegar. Carol Shields loved clarity in writing, her highest praise for “crisp” and “clear.” Now wait, for the glass crash is a lurking caveat. Surprise is what she practised so diligently in her poems and what carried over into her prose … .” The Ormsby Review
“Nearly twenty years after [Sheilds’] death, we have the welcome edition of her Collected Poetry. With the annotated addition of unpublished poems, Stovel’s volume reveals the intricate web of Shields’s humane creative intelligence.” British Journal of Canadian Studies
"The poems in this book are witty, sparked by Shields's signature interests in gender, class, and the frames of subjectivity; they are smartly formal and, like her novels, often subversively feminist. It is intriguing to see the kind of breadth that Shields brought to multiple projects throughout her poetic practice and this book has the ring of a well-kept secret." Tanis MacDonald, Wilfrid Laurier University and author of Mobile
"[Shields's] last novel, Unless, of which I was the first informal editor, starts with an image she tried out in an early poem: “Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head.” We hear that pane laughing while she cleans it with her recipe for window cleaner, a little sugar a little vinegar. Carol Shields loved clarity in writing, her highest praise for “crisp” and “clear.” Now wait, for the glass crash is a lurking caveat. Surprise is what she practised so diligently in her poems and what carried over into her prose … .” The Ormsby Review
“Nearly twenty years after [Sheilds’] death, we have the welcome edition of her Collected Poetry. With the annotated addition of unpublished poems, Stovel’s volume reveals the intricate web of Shields’s humane creative intelligence.” British Journal of Canadian Studies
Carol Shields (1935-2003) was an American-born Canadian award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, and poet.
Nora Foster Stovel is professor emerita, University of Alberta, and the author and editor of several books including Divining Margaret Laurence and Recognition and Revelation: Margaret Laurence’s Short Nonfiction Writings.
Nora Foster Stovel is professor emerita, University of Alberta, and the author and editor of several books including Divining Margaret Laurence and Recognition and Revelation: Margaret Laurence’s Short Nonfiction Writings.
xv Books by Carol Shields
xvii Foreword | After Enlightenment: The Poetry of Carol Shields
Jan Zwicky
xxiii Acknowledgments
xxv A Note on the Text with Abbreviations
xxvii Introduction | The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields
Nora Foster Stovel
POEMS BY CAROL SHIELDS
2 Others
4 A Woman We Know Who Suffers from Occasional Depression
5 Advice from a Green-Thumbed Friend
6 Margaret at Easter
7 The Ferryman at Prince Edward County
9 Some Old Friends Who Flew to England
10 The New Mothers
12 A Woman We Saw in an Antique Shop
13 A Cynical Friend Explains
14 Anne at the Symphony
15 A Fiftyish Aunt
16 Grandpa Who Is Eighty at the Cottage
17 A Husband Thinks Out Loud
18 Insomniac
19 Sara
20 A Member of the Bridge Club
21 Michael, A Boy in Our Neighbourhood
22 A Married Couple
23 Child Who Is Falling Asleep
24 An Old Lady We Saw
25 Our Artist Friends
27 Our Old Aunt Who Is Now in a Retirement Home
28 A Professor We Know Who Is a Compulsive Storyteller
29 Someone I Don’t Like Anymore and Never Really Did
30 No One’s Simple, Not Even Sally
31 Someone We Met Who Grew Up on a Farm
32 Our Old Professor
33 Someone Hurrying Home
34 Someone We’ve Heard a Lot About
35 The Stocking Man
36 John
37 Helen’s Morning
38 A Family Cycling By
39 Great-Grandma
40 Two Old Friends Who Arrived at Dawn
41 A Wife, Forty-Five, Remembers Love
42 Grandma’s Things
44 What Our Toronto Friends Said
46 An Old Couple Who Have Loved Each Other
47 A Friend of Ours Who Knits
49 A Physicist We Know
50 Someone We Haven’t Seen in Years
52 Two Little Girls Dressed as Witches
53 An East Coast Friend of Ours Writes from the West
55 A Wedding We Went to Once
57 An Acquaintance of Ours Who Is an Obsessive Christian
58 The Barman in Halifax
59 The Dean’s Wife
60 A Friend About to Be Divorced
61 A Mother We Know Who Has Many Children
62 A Member of Parliament
63 Intersect
64 Pioneers: Southeast Ontario
65 Mother
66 Friend: After Surgery
67 Aunt Alice Recalled
68 Reading in Bed
69 Woman at a Party
70 Professor
71 Suppertime 1950
72 Margaret, Aged Four
73 Service Call
74 Emily Dickinson
75 Rough Riders
77 Accidents
78 Volkswagen
79 Sister
80 After the Party: I
81 After the Party: II
82 Radio Announcer
83 Child Learning to Talk
84 A Couple Take a Sunday Drive
86 Letter from a Friend
87 William
88 Betty
89 Fetus
90 Our Mother’s Friends
92 Class in Evolution
93 Couple
94 Singer
96 Home Movies 1962
97 Old Friend - Long Distance
98 Uncle
99 Helen Lighting a Fire
100 Old Men
101 Friend of a Friend
102 Picnic at the Lake
103 Daughter
104 A Couple Celebrate Their Silver Anniversary
105 Someone We Saw
106 Family Friend, Aged Ninety
107 An Actor in the Little Theatre
108 Family at the Cottage
109 Poet
110 Sunbathers: Canada
111 January
112 Boys Playing Chess
113 Neighbour
114 Carolers: Ontario
115 Boy Waking Up
116 Circles
117 As for Us
118 Coming to Canada
120 Getting Born
122 Learning to Talk
123 I/Myself
124 Another Birth
125 The Radio -1940
126 Daddy
127 When Grandma Died - 1942
129 The Methodist Jesus
131 The Four Seasons
133 Visiting Aunt Violet
134 Learning to Read
135 Waking and Sleeping
137 Easter
138 Aunt Ada
139 The End of the War - 1945
140 Entry
141 Snow
142 Being Happy - 1949
144 Vision
145 Dog Days
146 Away from Home - 1954
147 Love - Age 20
149 Gifts
150 Coming to Canada - Age Twenty-Two
151 “New Poems” (from Coming to Canada)
153 Sunday Painter
155 Sleeping
156 Accident
157 Believe Me
158 Confession
159 Remembering
160 Whenever
161 Voices
162 Journey
163 Relics
164 Fortune
166 Aunt Violet’s Things
167 The Invention of Clocks
168 At the Clock Museum
169 Now
170 Quartz
171 Calendar Notes
172 Getting
173 Caragana
174 Spring
175 Cold Storage
177 Tenth Reunion
178 Daylight Saving
179 House
180 The Class of ’53 - Thirty Years Later
182 Wedding
183 Holiday
184 Falling Back
186 Fall
188 Together
189 Work
190 Walkers
191 Season’s Greetings
192 Mary Swann’s Poems in Swann
193 Part One: Sarah Maloney
195 Part Two: Morton Jimroy
196 Part Three: Rose Hindmarch
198 Part Four: Frederick Cruzzi
200 Lost Things
201 Snow Poem Sequence (previously unpublished)
232 “Time Line” Poem Sequence (previously unpublished)
233 Others
234 Laughter - Aged 16
235 Sunday Outing
236 All Day Long
237 Snapshot: Your face
238 Blame
239 At the Cottage
241 England
242 Expatriate
243 Somebody
244 Getting to Know
245 Cliché
246 The Fall
247 Likeness
248 Coping
249 Being Sad 1949
250 The Sunday Poems (previously unpublished)
Untitled poems are identified by their first line.
251 “Beside me on the plane”
252 “Some people, doing the cathedrals”
253 Other
255 Shock
256 Inside Sunday
257 Archived Poems (previously unpublished)
258 Learning to Write Poems
259 Going to Work
260 Sonnet
261 Couple
262 The Tea Ceremony
263 Mark Twain
265 Napoleon at St. Helena
267 Letters
268 Holiday
269 April in Ottawa
271 Annotations
279 Works Cited
xvii Foreword | After Enlightenment: The Poetry of Carol Shields
Jan Zwicky
xxiii Acknowledgments
xxv A Note on the Text with Abbreviations
xxvii Introduction | The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields
Nora Foster Stovel
POEMS BY CAROL SHIELDS
2 Others
4 A Woman We Know Who Suffers from Occasional Depression
5 Advice from a Green-Thumbed Friend
6 Margaret at Easter
7 The Ferryman at Prince Edward County
9 Some Old Friends Who Flew to England
10 The New Mothers
12 A Woman We Saw in an Antique Shop
13 A Cynical Friend Explains
14 Anne at the Symphony
15 A Fiftyish Aunt
16 Grandpa Who Is Eighty at the Cottage
17 A Husband Thinks Out Loud
18 Insomniac
19 Sara
20 A Member of the Bridge Club
21 Michael, A Boy in Our Neighbourhood
22 A Married Couple
23 Child Who Is Falling Asleep
24 An Old Lady We Saw
25 Our Artist Friends
27 Our Old Aunt Who Is Now in a Retirement Home
28 A Professor We Know Who Is a Compulsive Storyteller
29 Someone I Don’t Like Anymore and Never Really Did
30 No One’s Simple, Not Even Sally
31 Someone We Met Who Grew Up on a Farm
32 Our Old Professor
33 Someone Hurrying Home
34 Someone We’ve Heard a Lot About
35 The Stocking Man
36 John
37 Helen’s Morning
38 A Family Cycling By
39 Great-Grandma
40 Two Old Friends Who Arrived at Dawn
41 A Wife, Forty-Five, Remembers Love
42 Grandma’s Things
44 What Our Toronto Friends Said
46 An Old Couple Who Have Loved Each Other
47 A Friend of Ours Who Knits
49 A Physicist We Know
50 Someone We Haven’t Seen in Years
52 Two Little Girls Dressed as Witches
53 An East Coast Friend of Ours Writes from the West
55 A Wedding We Went to Once
57 An Acquaintance of Ours Who Is an Obsessive Christian
58 The Barman in Halifax
59 The Dean’s Wife
60 A Friend About to Be Divorced
61 A Mother We Know Who Has Many Children
62 A Member of Parliament
63 Intersect
64 Pioneers: Southeast Ontario
65 Mother
66 Friend: After Surgery
67 Aunt Alice Recalled
68 Reading in Bed
69 Woman at a Party
70 Professor
71 Suppertime 1950
72 Margaret, Aged Four
73 Service Call
74 Emily Dickinson
75 Rough Riders
77 Accidents
78 Volkswagen
79 Sister
80 After the Party: I
81 After the Party: II
82 Radio Announcer
83 Child Learning to Talk
84 A Couple Take a Sunday Drive
86 Letter from a Friend
87 William
88 Betty
89 Fetus
90 Our Mother’s Friends
92 Class in Evolution
93 Couple
94 Singer
96 Home Movies 1962
97 Old Friend - Long Distance
98 Uncle
99 Helen Lighting a Fire
100 Old Men
101 Friend of a Friend
102 Picnic at the Lake
103 Daughter
104 A Couple Celebrate Their Silver Anniversary
105 Someone We Saw
106 Family Friend, Aged Ninety
107 An Actor in the Little Theatre
108 Family at the Cottage
109 Poet
110 Sunbathers: Canada
111 January
112 Boys Playing Chess
113 Neighbour
114 Carolers: Ontario
115 Boy Waking Up
116 Circles
117 As for Us
118 Coming to Canada
120 Getting Born
122 Learning to Talk
123 I/Myself
124 Another Birth
125 The Radio -1940
126 Daddy
127 When Grandma Died - 1942
129 The Methodist Jesus
131 The Four Seasons
133 Visiting Aunt Violet
134 Learning to Read
135 Waking and Sleeping
137 Easter
138 Aunt Ada
139 The End of the War - 1945
140 Entry
141 Snow
142 Being Happy - 1949
144 Vision
145 Dog Days
146 Away from Home - 1954
147 Love - Age 20
149 Gifts
150 Coming to Canada - Age Twenty-Two
151 “New Poems” (from Coming to Canada)
153 Sunday Painter
155 Sleeping
156 Accident
157 Believe Me
158 Confession
159 Remembering
160 Whenever
161 Voices
162 Journey
163 Relics
164 Fortune
166 Aunt Violet’s Things
167 The Invention of Clocks
168 At the Clock Museum
169 Now
170 Quartz
171 Calendar Notes
172 Getting
173 Caragana
174 Spring
175 Cold Storage
177 Tenth Reunion
178 Daylight Saving
179 House
180 The Class of ’53 - Thirty Years Later
182 Wedding
183 Holiday
184 Falling Back
186 Fall
188 Together
189 Work
190 Walkers
191 Season’s Greetings
192 Mary Swann’s Poems in Swann
193 Part One: Sarah Maloney
195 Part Two: Morton Jimroy
196 Part Three: Rose Hindmarch
198 Part Four: Frederick Cruzzi
200 Lost Things
201 Snow Poem Sequence (previously unpublished)
232 “Time Line” Poem Sequence (previously unpublished)
233 Others
234 Laughter - Aged 16
235 Sunday Outing
236 All Day Long
237 Snapshot: Your face
238 Blame
239 At the Cottage
241 England
242 Expatriate
243 Somebody
244 Getting to Know
245 Cliché
246 The Fall
247 Likeness
248 Coping
249 Being Sad 1949
250 The Sunday Poems (previously unpublished)
Untitled poems are identified by their first line.
251 “Beside me on the plane”
252 “Some people, doing the cathedrals”
253 Other
255 Shock
256 Inside Sunday
257 Archived Poems (previously unpublished)
258 Learning to Write Poems
259 Going to Work
260 Sonnet
261 Couple
262 The Tea Ceremony
263 Mark Twain
265 Napoleon at St. Helena
267 Letters
268 Holiday
269 April in Ottawa
271 Annotations
279 Works Cited
Review by The Ormsby Review:
https://ormsbyreview.com/2021/11/02/1271-rogers-shields-em/
Review by The Literary Review of Canada
https://ormsbyreview.com/2021/11/02/1271-rogers-shields-em/
Review by The Literary Review of Canada
