editorial

Very recently, The Atlantic published “The Greatest Poet Alive: The Feral Genius of Australia’s Les Murray,” a gushing, appreciative overview of Murray’s career disguised as a review of his latest book Waiting for the Past. It is far from alone in its adoration of Murray’s distinguished career. Though he does have his detractors, and he was a major figure in Australia’s “poetry wars,” his name is regularly included on lists of potential Nobel Prize winners, and Joseph Brodsky’s claim that Murray is “quite simply, the one by whom the language lives” is oft-quoted.

What is summer in Canada but a figment of our imagination. So how better to celebrate summer than to translate summer’s haze into the tangible leaves you hold in your hands right now, though poems, perhaps, are only words in passing. Poems might wander into the woods or slip down a rank alley, but we can follow them and let them hold us for a moment. You should take them to your summer haunts. Fire escape, cottage porch, side of the road, café, diner, pub, bar, flopped on a sofa with a fan playing across your body, on the beach, by the lake, on the river bank, on a park bench.

I was thrilled to work with Katie Fewster-Yan to select poems from across the career of Mary Jo Salter. Together we debated, tussled, and celebrated over the choosing of this selection, which we hope you will enjoy.

A life has a remarkable durability and fragility. In this issue we mark the passing of Frances (Firth) Gammon, who was just short of a hundred years old at the time of her death. She attended the University of New Brunswick during the Second World War and was a member of the Bliss Carman Society, which was a group of undergraduates interested in poetry under the direction of Alfred Bailey. As a way of recording the poetry produced by their group, the members of society established a modest little journal, which they decided to call The Fiddlehead.