More than 30 years in the making, Frank Davey’s careful archaeology of the catalogue of innocence his youthful imagination assembled growing up in and immediately after World War II is a work of astonishment.
This is no lyrical work of sentimental nostalgia, no attempt to return to a romanticized “simpler past,” no rediscovery of “the child within,” but rather a careful reconstruction of “the child without.” The reader moves through these poems, neither sanitized nor updated by their passage through experience, as one would through a gallery installation of intensely personal epiphanies, both frightening and ecstatic, lucid and obscure. They are stripped of any cultural preconception, a Blakean vision of the good and evil men and women do as they engage the other in a world at war—a world where the war is always somewhere else, but where the enemy, unseen, is everywhere present in the invented surrogates of combat.

Born in Vancouver, Frank Davey was Carl F. Klinck Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario. Upon his retirement in 2005, the conference “Poetics and Public Culture in Canada” was held in his honour. Davey attended the University of British Columbia where he was a co-founder of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. Since 1963, he has been the editor-publisher of the poetics journal Open Letter. With fellow TISH poet Fred Wah, Davey founded the world’s first on-line literary magazine, SwiftCurrent in 1984.

A prolific and highly-esteemed author of numerous books and scholarly articles on Canadian literary criticism and poetry, Davey writes with a unique panache as he examines with humour and irony the ambiguous play of signs in contemporary culture, the popular stories that lie behind it, and the struggles between different identity-based groups in our globalizing society—racial, regional, gender-based, ethnic, economic—that drive this play.

Frank Davey's profile page