Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962–1991

Fred Wah’s career has spanned six decades and a range of formal styles and preoccupations. Scree collects Wah’s concrete and sound poetry of the 1960s, his landscape-centric work of the 1970s, and his ethnicity-oriented poems of the 1980s. Fred was a founding member of the avant-garde TISH group, which helped turn Canadian poetry, in the West in particular, to a focus on language. He has said that his “writing has been sustained, primarily, by two interests: racial hybridity and the local.”Most of Wah’s early work is out of print. This collection allows readers to (re)discover this groundbreaking work. The volume contains: Lardeau (1965)Mountain (1967)Among (1972)Tree (1972)Earth (1974)Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975)Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek (1980)Owner’s Manual (1981)Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh (1981)Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail (1982)Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985)Rooftops (1988)So Far (1991) The collection has been organized according to a chronology of composition (rather than a chronology of original publication): this reveals new connections and thematic trajectories in the body of work as a whole, and makes the book an eminently “teachable” volume. The book includes full-colour facsimiles of two early books, Earth and Tree, reproduced to show the "hands-on" object-based aspect of chapbook publishing. Read more