What Does A House Want: Selected Poems

(Paperback)

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What Does a House Want affirms Gary Geddess place as one of the premier Canadian poets of his generation. Equally at home with the lyric and the long poem, Geddes brings his "deadly accuracy in language and form" and his no-holds-barred style to bear on multinationals, Israeli-Palestinian violence, the guilt of Leon Trotsky, P.O.W.s, assassins, mad-bombers, China's bloody Emperor Qin Shi Huang, and the reputation of Ezra Pound. "Sandra Lee Scheuer," a lyric on the Kent State killings, has been described as "the kind of poem most poets wait a lifetime for;" and The Terracotta Army, an award-winning sequence on politics and art, insists on the marriage of story and song, embracing narrative, yet achieving a rare and luminous lyric intensity.

Reviews

"It comes as a relief to read work by a poet who appears to be at least as interested in the world as he is in himself. Here, we are happy to be conducted by Gary Geddes out of the glass dome of the ego and into a wider, more capacious world of culture, history, and even erudition." --Billy Collins

"The poems in Gary Geddes's What Does a House Want have weight not often found in contemporary poetry, partly because they range far and wide, are not about one person, family, continent, or even era. They are about the world, about us in that world. They are fanciful, playful, sad, intense, frightening, and authentic, often all those at once. Mostly, though, Geddes's poems are true, each and every one." --Mary Troy, author of Beauties
". . . a deadly accuracy in language and form." --Eli Mandel
"'Sandra Lee Scheuer' is the kind of poem most poets wait a lifetime for." --Al Purdy

Author Bio

Gary Geddes has written and edited more than forty books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama, criticism, translation, and anthologies, and won a dozen national and international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence, and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from Chile, which was awarded simultaneously to Octavio Paz, Vaclav Havel, Ernesto Cardenal, Rafael Alberti, and Mario Benedetti. When not serving as Distinguished Professor at Western Washington University or Visiting Writer at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, he resides on Thetis Island, British Columbia.