E.J. Pratt (1882-1964) is one of Canada's best-known poets. This volume collects, for the first time, his own comments on his life and work. Pratt's good humour, his sincerity, and his extraordinary capacity for friendship emerge in these pages.

Susan Gingell teaches and researches decolonizing and transnational literatures at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the editor of two volumes in The Collected Works of E.J. Pratt and of “Textualizing Orature and Orality,” a special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing (#83).

Wendy Roy is an associate professor of Canadian literature at the University of Saskatchewan. She has published a book on women’s travel writing in Canada, Maps of Difference: Canada, Women, and Travel (2005), as well as essays on writers Margaret Laurence and Carol Shields, among others.

Susan Gingell's profile page

'We make exhilarating contact with the man behind the poems -- warm, generous, ready to take risks -- whose interest in keeping poetry up to date was not by retreat into Art, but by making it communicate the technological age … some of the wording may be old-fashioned, but the sentiments are relevant and valuable. [It] would make an excellent gift for anyone interested in seeing what the pursuit of literature can be: central, enriching, humane.'

The Whig-Standard

'Wit was always a distinction of Pratt's verse .... After his PhD in Pauline eschatology, Pratt wanted to get Hell out of his system, so he wrote The Witches' Brew, a comic narrative about the effect on alcohol on fish. Literary critics in Great Britain searched for hidden meanings and symbolism, but not finding them, claimed that the book was a libel on the brands and therefore either a temperance pamphlet or an exceedingly obscure advertisement.'

Toronto Star

'Pratt ... was possessed of immense good sense about writing. Both his good sense and his good will shine through the book.'

Books in Canada