Dry Wells of India
An Anthology Against Thirst
- Publisher
- Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
- Initial publish date
- Jan 1989
- Category
- Canadian, Anthologies (multiple authors), General
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781550170016
- Publish Date
- Jan 1989
- List Price
- $18.95
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
The Canadian Poetry Contest was launched to provide funds to help Canada India Village Aid in its programme of building dams and digging wells to counter the serious drought conditions that have arisen in northwestern India. A total of 1,255 poets entered no less than 3,223 poems. This collection includes the six prize-winning poems by John Pass (first prize), J. Dalayne Barber, Ron Charach, Jan Conn, Kerry Johanssen and Dale (David) Zieroth plus 45 by such well-known poets as Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, H.R. Percy and Susan Musgrave as well as a host of others, many published here for the first time.
About the authors
George Woodcock (1912-1995) is one of Canada's best-known and most prolific authors. He was born in Winnipeg and educated in England, where he socialized with some of the century's most prominent writers and intellectuals including Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Herbert Read and T.S. Eliot. He returned to Canada in 1949 and taught at the University of British Columbia for many years. In 1959, he founded the journal Canadian Literature. His contribtution to Canadian culture is immeasurable; he either wrote or edited over one-hundred books including The Crystal Spirit, his Governor-Genral's award-winning biography of Orwell; Gabriel Dumont, another bestselling biography; and Anarchism a guide to the political philosophy which continues to be read around the world. His wide range of writing includes literary criticism, poetry, travel writing, plays, social history, biography, politics and essays.
George Woodcock's profile page
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
Excerpt: Dry Wells of India: An Anthology Against Thirst (edited by George Woodcock; foreword by Margaret Atwood)
A man who surprises the goddess bathing, naked
in full blush, head and shoulders haughty above
her scurrying handmaidens, who stumbles
upon her by accident, in an idle moment
as you or I upon the full, clear moon
over the mountain's white shoulder
driving, some January afternoon
the mundane highway. Such a man
in shift
from man of action to man the actor
in her drama, in transition, on the cusp
unaccountable, inarticulate, awkward
within strident grace
dies at the hands of his companions
dies in the teeth of his training, his prized hounds, dies her death as image of his desire-wild, elusive
specimen, silhouette
on a high ridge, leapt
out of range, out of bounds
except to accident, the tricks
of idleness, subtle art
of intention at rest, of the huntress. He dies
in the noise of his name, his friends shouting
"Actaeon, Actaeon. . .," wondering
at his absence, missing
the thrill of the kill.
And "Actaeon," in tone
innocent, excited
echoes today in its exile (unchosen, undeserved
and not bad luck exactly) echoes
because he cannot answer, strains to
through his muzzle, soft lips, thick tongue
of the herbivore, makes sounds
not animal, not human
and cannot and dies
in a body made exquisitely
for life, a trophy, a transport
for his name, lapsed quickly
on the lips of his companions (never
comprehending) on my lips now
ironic, uncertain, changed as he
who saw her
saw through the guise of modesty and boyish
enthusiasm her bright body wet
as any mortal's, saw
through no effort nor virtue nor fault
of his own, his eyes a deer's eyes
darkening, widening, feminine, startled
who otherwise would be unknown to us.
