Peacock BlueAuthor :
Paperback
Published : Thursday 17 December 2015
Description
When Phyllis Webb published Wilsons Bowl in 1980, Northrop Frye hailed it as "a landmark in Canadian literature": landmark, an event that marks a turning point in something (in this case, Canadian literature); and an instantly recognized feature of a landscape (in this case, the landscape of Canadian poetry). Wilsons Bowl was Webbs fifth volume of poetry. Three more followed and then she fell silent, turning from literature to abstract painting.
Peacock Blue compiles in a single volume all of Webbs published, unpublished, and uncollected works from a writing career that spanned fifty years. It offers readers the opportunity to relish the arc of Webbs entire poetic oeuvre, from the modernist lyricism of her early works, to the groundbreaking volume, Naked Poems (1965), in which Webb created for herself a new minimalist language; from Wilsons Bowl to what Douglas Barbour calls "Webbs loving and subversive engagement with the ghazal" in Water and Light (1984); and finally to the postmodernist prose poems of Hanging Fire (1990).
The concluding section of Peacock Blue contains almost fifty poems, some of which have never been published before. It also includes brilliant but forgotten poems and poetic surprises. Brenda Carr has suggested that one of Webbs later essays, "Message Machine" (1990), "initiates a re-reading of her poetics and practice . Against her anxiety that she is a passive `message machine for masculinist culture." However, as Carr points out, "Webb posits another possibility - `cross-dressing. She theorizes her mimicry of the male persona as analogous to a `masquerade or `street theatre and in so doing reconstructs even her earlier poems as a performative space in which agency is possible." The truth of Carrs insight becomes increasingly apparent to anyone who undertakes to read through Webbs entire poetic output, gathered together, at last, in Peacock Blue.
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