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David Solway, 2000

DAVID SOLWAY is the author of many books of poetry including the award-winning Modern Marriage; Bedrock; Chess Pieces; Saracen Island: The Poetry of Andreas Karavis, The Lover‚s Progress: Poems after William Hogarth (illustrated by Marion Wagschal and adapted for the stage by Curtain Razors), and Franklin‚s Passage. His work has been anthologized in The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, McClelland and Stewart's New Canadian Poetry, Border Lines: Contemporary Poetry in English from Copp Clark, and The Bedford Introduction to Literature from St. Martin's Press. Among his prose publications, Education Lost won the QSPELL Prize for Nonfiction and Random Walks was a finalist for Le Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. The Turtle Hypodermic of Sickenpods, was released by McGill-Queen's in 2001.

Solway publishes regularly in such journals as The Atlantic Monthly, The Sewanee Review, The Fiddlehead and Books in Canada, and is an occasional contributor to the Book Pages of the National Post. His more specialized writings have appeared in the International Journal of Applied Semiotics, Policy Options: Institute on Research in Public Policy, and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies.

Solway has recently completed a new collection of poems entitled The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat, scheduled with Goose Lane Editions for Spring 2005, and is now working on his fourth book in education and culture, entitled Reading, Riting and Rhythmitic. A collection of literary/critical essays, Director's Cut, was released by The Porcupine's Quill in Fall 2003. He was appointed writer-in-residence at Concordia University for 1999-2000 and is currently a contributing editor with Canadian Notes & Queries and an associate editor with Books in Canada.

QUOTES ABOUT SOLWAY’S WORK

“David Solway is one of the most significant poets writing in Canada today. I know of no other poet who comes up to his knowledge of the craft or his devotion to excellence. He is a poet who bears watching and he will – I am sure – fulfill the promise that his signature poems give.”
– Irving Layton

“Solway’s touch is intricate, humorous, restless, conciliatory, and coherent. And he works an artful magic.” – Montreal Gazette

“I have enjoyed David Solway’s poems for decades, and am glad to see a new collection; glad, too, to find that these Chess Pieces are wholly accessible to one whose grasp of the game is primitive. Here, as always, Solway writes with a Gravesian dash and brio, taking (and giving) pleasure in a fine vocabulary, a gift for surprising figures, and a striking breadth of reference.”
– Richard Wilbur