New Releases by Don Coles

In A Serious Call, Governor General’s Award-winner Don Coles presents a collection of moments suspended in time: a line of poetry, forgotten for years and remembered as often; a photograph cut out of a 1942 newspaper that saves its subjects not from death but from oblivion; a fond memory of a bookshop in Southwark, where books feed a love of literature and a life-long friendship. In a deceptively plainspoken style enhanced by his signature precision, Coles’s contemplation of everyday moments and objects reveals not only the power of memory, but also the innermost fears and longings of the human spirit.

Where We Might Have Been, Don Coles'' first book of new poetry in a decade, provides everything we''ve come to expect from the Governor General Award-winning poet: exact observations sharply etched with unimprovable lines, simple moments crackling with psychological complexity and a plain-speaking sophistication entirely his own. But there is also something different in these poems: a canny, energized, improvisatory fluency newly alive to Coles'' trademark stock-taking. Where We Might Have Been transforms family memories, old European haunts, and literary mementoes into tour de force reckonings of mortality. Rarely has Coles'' self-scrutiny been so exposed and exciting.

Don Coles'' Forests of the Medieval World (PQL 1993) won the Governor General''s Award for poetry. Kurgan (PQL 2000) won the Trillum Prize in Ontario. The Essential Don Coles presents an affordable collection of the poet''s very best work.

A collection spanning the career of Don Coles, this compilation of personal essays and reviews combines published prose with vital new pieces that explore the genres of biography and translation. Summing up decades of reading and adventurous travel while investigating the influences on his writing, this assemblage presents Coles as one of Canada''s most incisive literary critics, revealing his unconventional assessments of Graham Greene, Thomas Mann, Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Robert Frost, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and many others. Passionate and progressive, the book is at once a personal memoir and discriminating literary criticism.

With an introduction by critic W.J. Keith, this overdue reissue of Coles''s early virtuosity--a voice whose austere, tender, insouciant, sad-lit clarity reinvented Canadian poetry--allows readers to glimpse the evolution and shaping of a major writer.

Doctor Bloom''s Story, a wry and subtle novel, is a Knopf Canada New Face of Fiction selection for 2004 and already a popular and critical favourite. What starts off sounding like a charming, bittersweet memoir develops rapidly into a complex and moving book centred on a pressing moral dilemma. In the first few pages, Dr. Nicolaas Bloom, cardiologist and would-be writer, describes his life''s trajectory: from medical and literary studies in Leiden, Holland, through practice and research in Cambridge to, following the death of his wife, a new life in uptown Toronto. Dr. Bloom''s story proper begins in a writing workshop, taught by his tough-talking neighbour Larry Logan: Bloom finds himself entranced by one of his young classmates, a quiet, self-possessed young woman named Sophie Fuhr. The novel quickly establishes the rhythm it will pursue throughout, its present-day action in counterpoint with Bloom''s memories and reflections. Bloom works in a downtown medical clinic; he remembers his late wife and stillborn daughter; he considers his literary masters, most of all Chekhov; importantly, he meets Larry Logan''s estranged wife Marianne. Then, out for a run in a local ravine, he sees a woman being beaten up; he has reason to believe it is his classmate, Sophie. As Bloom and Marianne Logan fall for one another, and Bloom tentatively pursues his long postponed writing, Sophie''s situation becomes more and more of a concern; soon it has drawn in Larry, Marianne and others, none of whom are able to step in and help her. This is in part because, complicating matters, Sophie does not appear to want to be "rescued." As she puts it, speaking of herself in a coded, charged conversation inthe writing workshop: ""She has a belief. She believes that there are circumstances which, although they may not appear happy, are part of a the deeper life.... it would be a mistake, she thinks, to leave these circumstances." " Sophie''s husband, Walter Rollo Maggione, comes to Bloom for cardiac treatment. Abrasive and arrogant, some twenty-five years older than Sophie, he is a Swiss psychologist pursuing a doctorate at the University of Toronto, specializing in Jung. Meanwhile Marianne, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, has come to care about Sophie as deeply as Bloom has. Bloom and Marianne return from a brief Caribbean vacation to discover Sophie in the emergency room of Sunnybrook hospital, bruised and battered, claiming to have fallen down the stairs. Her husband has also been admitted, after an attack of angina. Attempts to intervene prove fruitless, but Bloom sees a way he could help Sophie: as Maggione''s physician, he is aware of the subtleties of his condition, aware that were Maggione to not have the right medication to hand at the right moment, his life could be in danger. The novel''s central moral question gains shape: given all he knows about Sophie''s situation -- about the violence and suffering she experiences, and her view of it as a kind of religious task -- can Bloom justify "altering the odds"? Can he make it less likely that Maggione will pull through his next cardiac malfunction? Bloom''s dilemma, carefully examined and disentangled, will haunt readers of this supple and moving novel long after its resolution. "From the Trade Paperback edition."

`Most of all, it is Coles''s mastery of syntax, sinuous and unpredictable, that brings his poems alive. The trademark hesitations, asides and parentheses that mark his lines derive from speech (a Hemingway wife is ``one of the specialty, I am/going to risk saying, dishes in the big man''s/moveable feast'''') and are all measured out and weighed in beautifully constructed sentences. They reflect, I will risk saying, a radical skepticism: ``Nothing/here doubts itself, from which it follows/there is not a hint of me here, '''' he tells us. This doubt, perhaps Coles''s most modern trait, runs through and enriches all of Kurgan (as it did his great book-length poem Little Bird) and places his poetry among the very best being written in English.'' - Richard Sanger - Globe & Mai

Don Coles has earned a reputation as one of Canada''s finest contemporary poets with books such as "The Prinzhorn Collection" and "Little Bird." In his new poetry collection, "Forests of the Medieval World," he explores the power of memory. Shadowy figures from the past -- a woman in a car, a child at the seashore, a father''s college basketball teammates -- float through the poems of the book''s first section. A modern tale of love is intertwined with an account of the destruction of Europe''s medieval forests. The poet recalls the baseball games and adventure books of his boyhood; he dreams of what death would be like for Cambridge University''s Wren Library; and he listens to long-dead fathers'' giving counsel to their troubled daughters'' in a nursing home. Rounding out the volume is a haunting sequence of poems about the private world of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. The Edvard Munch Poems'' were inspired by Coles''s reading of Munch''s diaries, which are still largely untranslated. Best known for his famous work The Cry, '' Munch was a lonely and painfully sensitive man. He returned obsessively in his paintings to the pivotal events of his early life: the deaths of his mother and his beloved sister, Sophie, and his adolescent affair with a married woman, the mysterious Fru H.'' The departure point for each of these poems is one of Munch''s paintings and most are offered in the voice of the artist himself. Coles, whose collection "K. in Love" explored the inner thoughts of writer Franz Kafka, is a master at suggesting character through the nuances of poetic expression.

The frame of Don Coles'' Little Bird is a love letter to his father. It is also about their familial bond and the `languages'' they used to conduct that relationship. Little Bird is a subtle, wise, witty exploration of the inheritance of language, of family circumstances, and, ultimately, of love.

K. in Love is an adventure of a very risky sort: a series of unabashedly loving anecdotes displaying delicate vitality and pure lyricism. Coles makes it work precisely because of the vulnerabilities, the hesitations, those slenderest of threads strung between absence and presence, possibility and probability.