This book is an exhilarating revelation. No other poet in Canada has the depth and range of Dennis Lee. Jazzman, jester, and metaphysician, hardball political thinker and passionate lover, he has been publishing poems for fifty years, working across the spectrum from nursery rhymes and skipping songs to uncompromising moral introspection to full-tilt love songs, plangent psalms, and ecstatic, solitary prayer. This Omnibus represents them all, and it will make your head spin.
There are poets’ poets and people’s poets. And then there are those few who are neither and both: the few who become, over time, part of the warp and weft of their culture.The Dennis Lee Omnibuscollects for the first time work from all corners of this extraordinary career, from Lee’s searing early breakthroughs to his beloved children's verse to his visions of environmental apocalypse. A must-have collection from one of Canada’s literary icons.
Dennis Leeis the author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose, an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. He was born in Toronto in 1939, wrote the song lyrics for Jim Henson’sFraggle Rock, and in 2001 he was named the city’s first poet laureate. He initiated the programme of Legacy plaques in Toronto, and recently served as a resident artist with Soulpepper Theatre Company.