The poetry of William Wrightson Eustace Ross spans over forty years. He married the well-known journalist, Mary Lowrey Ross, and died in Toronto in 1966. Ross’s work was published in The Dial – he was one of the few poets whose poems the editor, Marianne Moore, did not attempt to rewrite – but during his lifetime he published only three privately printed books.He left behind not only a great mass of unpublished manuscripts, but a reputation as the first modern Canadian poet, a reputation confirmed by the publication of Shapes and Sounds: The Poetry of W.W.E. Ross in 1966. That book, fine as it was, focused on Ross the imagist only, but he was also the first surrealist (or irrealist, as he liked to speak of it) – years ahead of the automatistes in Quebec – a translator, and a sonneteer of formal excellence. Through him, modernist poetry in Canada must now be looked at with an entirely fresh eye.

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BARRY CALLAGHAN founded the internationally celebrated literary quarterly, Exile, and imprint, Exile Editions, while he was a war correspondent in the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s. He is a novelist, poet and journalist and his work has been much anthologized. His numerous awards include Toronto’s One Hundred Outstanding Citizens Award, the inaugural W. Mitchell Award and the Foundation For The Advancement of Canadian Letters Award for Fiction which he was honoured with twice.

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