a/long prairie lines

The prairie long poem has, for many decades, survived at the nexus of poetic tradition on the Canadian prairies. This anthology is the first to bring together the region's most remarkable examples of this genre; in the process, it revives many long poems which were out of print. As narrative, as documentary, as imaginative landscaping, these poems collectively impart a long-range vision of prairie space, from the earliest pioneers of this form to contemporary poets delineating the postmodernist scene in the west.The anthology represents "a voyage through the physical, psychic and verbal geography of Western Canada.... Like professional explorers and archeologists, the poets in this volume not only stride through time, moving back and forth along the energy lines between their discoveries and themselves, but they also find naming and travelling through space crucial to their discipline."— from the Editor's Preface