Child Eating Snow

by David Wevill

Written by one of Canada’s most distinctive poets, this collection of lyric poems, elegiac in their exploration of memory, offers a way of transcending the present and informing the future.

111 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1994

About the author

David Wevill was born a Canadian in Japan in 1935, and was educated in both Canada and England. He has lived in Burma and in Spain but has made his home in Austin, Texas for the past thirty years. While resident in England in the 1960s and 1970s, he established a substantial reputation as a poet, publishing four volumes between 1964 and 1974. He won prizes, was represented in all the major anthologies, and was included in the renowned Penguin Modern Poets series before his first full collection appeared. With his move across the Atlantic, he fell from view in Britain, although his work continued to be published in his native Canada. His main publications are: Birth of a Shark (1964), A Christ of the Ice-floes (1966), Firebreak (1971), Where the Arrow Falls (1973), Other Names for the Heart (1985), Figure of Eight (1987), Child Eating Snow (1994), Solo With Grazing Deer (2001). He has also published translations of Fernando Pessoa and Ferenc Juhász. David Wevill teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Texas, Austin.

Associated in his early career with The Group, his work appeared in A Group Anthology before being selected for the Penguin Modern Poets series—where he shared a volume with David Holbrook and Christopher Middleton. Important for the development of his early work were Jungian theory and mid-century Spanish poetry, above all García Lorca, Neruda and Paz. As Martin Seymour-Smith observed, "The Jungian 'search', an admittedly circular one, is Wevill's main theme, and so his poetry needs to be read in its entirety to be fully appreciated".

Source: http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/...

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Wevill was the professor of a poetry writing course that I took in the spring of 2009. He was a sensitive, soft-spoken man who knew how to make a biting joke at just the right time, and gave us all a laugh by stopping to exclaim "ahh what the hell am i talking about?!" when he got too carried away.

he was very encouraging to me, to all of us in his class. he was familiar with and spoke reverently of seemingly every poem that has ever been written.

i've never met anyone like David Wevill. you could tell he earned his smile, exchanged depths of sadness and snow drifts for that wry soother. and on the last day of class, the last thing we expected was for him to produce from his bag a stack of signed poetry books for us. when he began to read some of his poems, the wind stopped and the leaves paused to listen.