Gary Geddes

Gary Geddes has been called Canada's best political poet. For almost forty years and in more than a dozen poetry collections, Geddes has written with power and insight about myriad political issues both domestic and foreign, from the Paul Chartier Affair and FLQ terrorism in War and Other Measures to the Canadian Airborne Regiment and the infamous Somalia Affair in Airborne Particles. However, Geddes is no mere armchair political scientist clad in the sheep's clothing of poet, and his work is much more than an extended exercise in political punditry. Whether Geddes is writing about isolated political events such as the Kent State Massacre or about ongoing political crises such as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he does so with sensitivity and compassion towards the individual human lives that are ineluctably bound up in political events, lives that can so easily be occluded by those events. This volume of the Guernica Writers Series brings together a number of unique and important perspectives on Gary Geddes's extensive writing career. Six newly commissioned articles by Robert G. May, Shirley McDonald, W.H. New, Bruno Sibona, Lake Sagaris, and M. Wynn Thomas are accompanied by an excerpt from Winnifred Bogaards' extensive 1997 study of Geddes's work in Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, a far-ranging interview with the poet conducted by Robert G. May, as well as a detailed compilation of biographical and bibliographical materials.