Content area
Full Text
Opening Words
Eli Mandel
The Other Harmony: The Collected Poetry of Eli Mandel. 2 vols. Ed. Andrew Stubbs and Judy Chapman. Canadian Plains Research Centre $49.95
This two-volume collection of over four hundred poems offers the reader a comprehensive picture of Eli Mandel's development as a major Canadian poet. Poems from four decades are included here, ranging from some of Mandel's earliest published works in Third Person Singular and Trio in the late 1940s and the early 1950s to Life Sentence in the 1980s. Always one to follow his own bent, Mandel, who died in 1992, has left his readers a rich legacy of poetry that is by turns disciplined, uncompromising, probing and delicate. While we may not always see or hear the personal side of the man in his individual poems, especially in the earlier ones, an overview of his life's work suffuses us with an unmistakable awareness of Mandel's intellectual and emotional presence.
Volume One contains Mandel's contributions to Trio (his first collection, co-published with Gael Turnbull and Phyllis Webb), his Fuseli Poems, Black and Secret Man, An Idiot Joy, Stony Plain, Out of Place, the "oratory" Mary Midnight, and Life Sentence: Poems and Journals 1976-1980. These collected works mark the first volume as clearly the more significant of the two in terms of its primary material. Volume Two contains Mandel's contributions to Third Person Singular, an apparently rare...