For his tenth collection, 36 Cornelian Avenue, Christopher Wiseman returns to his wartime childhood in England and revisits the streets, shore, and woods that belonged to the resort town of Scarborough where, his father away fighting, he and his mother lived. In clear, quick-moving colloquial poetry, Wiseman explores how the Second World War affected his neighbours, turning some into curmudgeons, others into compassionate heroes, and how the experience toughened the frightened women and children into survivors, waiting for their men to come home. Part novel, part memoir, part passionate recollection, 36 Cornelian Avenue presents these townspeople, often in their own words, as they were then, caught in the heartbreaking hardship of those years. Mines on the beach, air attacks, hostile neighbours, and cruel school teachers are among the many vivid, brilliantly textured memories recreated in this book, the most astonishing Wiseman has ever written.

Born and educated in Britain, Christopher Wiseman came to Canada in 1969. He taught at the University of Calgary, where he founded the Creative Writing programme, until his retirement in 1997. His poetry, short fiction and critical writings have been published and broadcast extensively in Canada, Britain and the United States. His poetry has won two Province of Alberta Poetry Awards, the Poetry Prize from the Writers Guild of Alberta, the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize and an Alberta Achievement Award for Excellence in the literary Arts. He has served on the Board of the Alberta Foundation for the Literary Arts, as President of the Writers Guild of Alberta, and as editor and poetry editor of both ARIEL and Dandelion. Christopher Wiseman lives in Calgary.

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