VIRTUAL LAUNCH | The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields - Nora Foster Stovel

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Join Nora Foster Stovel for the launch of The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields.

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.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Carol Shields (1935-2003) was an American-born Canadian award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, and poet. Best known for her fiction writing, she 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The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging from the early 1970s to Shields’s death in 2003.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.