Gary Geddes's name is a byword for excellence, and Active Trading, his fifteenth book, added to his list of honours. Active Trading contains Geddes's best known and most accomplished poems, arranged in chronological order to make his development as a poet and thinker clearly visible. From cover to cover, it's full of award-winners and audience-pleasers.

Gary Geddes was born in Vancouver and raised mostly on the west coast, where he gill netted, loaded boxcars at BC Sugar Refinery, stocked shelves at Woodwards, worked as a fishing guide at Whytecliffe, taught on Texada Island, and drove water-taxi. After doing graduate studies at Reading University in England and at the University of Toronto, he embarked on a varied career as a writer, teacher, editor, and publisher. Gary taught for twenty years at Concordia University in Montreal before returning to the west coast, where he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture at Western Washington University (1998-2001) and served as writer-in-residence at Green College (UBC), and the Vancouver Public Library. He has written and edited more than thirty-five books of poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, criticism, translation and anthologies, including 20th Century Poetry & Poetics and 15 Canadian Poets Times 3. His literary awards include the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize (1970), the National Poetry Prize (1981), the Americas Best Book Award in the 1985 Commonwealth Poetry Competition, National Magazine Gold Award (1987), the Writers Choice Award (1988), Archibald Lampman Prize (1990 and 1996), the Poetry Book Society Recommendation (1996) and the Gabriela Mistral Prize (1996), which he shared with Nobel laureates Octavio Paz and Vaclav Havel and with Rafael Alberti, Ernesto Cardenal, and Mario Benedetti. Gary Geddes lives on Vancouver Island, where he divides his time between Victoria and French Beach.

Gary Geddes' profile page

"A sharp eye for physical detail, a keen and uncompromising intellect, and a poetic sensibility that balances subjectivity and objectivity, the personal and the impersonal, and criticism and compassion." — David Staines, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature

"His work has the political edge of the best writing of the 20th century. His passion and outrage are controlled with a sure hand, and his craftsmanship is brilliant." — Timothy Findley