Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets Paperback - 1998

From the publisher

A new generation of Canadian poets has come of age!

In this volume, award-winning poets Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane present the work of 31 of the country's best young poets, including Michael Redhill, Karen Solie, Karen Connelly, Gregory Scofield, and Stephanie Bolster. These are the writers who were born in the mid-1960s to 1970s, Crozier writes. They are a large, precocious, ardent group of skilled and passionate writers, and they have a faith in the power of poetry to rekindle, redeem and renew. Without a doubt their poems are breathing fire.

Born in the sixties and seventies, these poets are the best of the new and the best of the young. They are the voices of the nineties, a decade that will bridge the millennium. Not since the early seventies when Al Purdy put together his Storm Warning anthologies has there been as audacious and provocative a collection of new poetry. The poets here are in your face and in your heart, celebrating poetry in all its exhilirating variations. What is remarkable are not only the new contexts and new stories, but how respectfully and joyfully the new writers have returned to the poets who wrote before them.

We have been waiting for this new generation. Their eloquent poetry speaks to our times, to who we have been and who we are about to be.