Complete poems / E. J. Pratt ; edited by Sandra Djwa and R. G. Moyles.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The volume offers a full sampling of Pratt's poems chosen both for their representativeness and for their intrinsic value.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

From sea to sea, as the motto goes, Canadian scholars are completing a huge project, the publication of the collected works of E.J. Pratt; the current volumes join two earlier volumes of David G. Pitt's biography, E.J. Pratt (The Truant Years, CH, Feb '85; The Master Years, CH, Sep '88), as well as E.J. Pratt on His Life and Poetry, ed. by Susan Gingell (1983), and presage the arrival of selected prose and collected correspondence. Toronto's efforts share a first-rate format and appearance, and the poetry volumes boast annotations (great gobs of them, some of which may be necessary for most readers) and a fine descriptive bibliography, as well as an appendix of unpublished works. Together, the separate approaches merge into the definitive Pratt. It would seem impossible to supersede this effort. Inevitably, the question of the project's usefulness to nonspecialists arises: Can one live without nearly a foot-long hot dog's worth of Pratt on the shelf? After all, Pratt's historical position alone cannot justify reading him all winter, especially in the North. The answer must be that the Pratt group has enabled us to see not only Pratt's poems and life (with other genres to come) but also something of shifting ideas about poetry, psychology, religion, social Darwinism, and Canadian nationalism that made up the historical moment--more than 80 years of moments, really. The effort will have been noteworthy no matter how the future treats Pratt. Djwa and Moyles have treated him, and all of us, that well. A must-buy for Canadian literature collections. -R. H. Solomon, University of Alberta