Fred Wah's career has spanned six decades and a range of formal styles
and preoccupations. Scree collects Wah's concrete and sound poetry of
the 1960s, his landscape-centric work of the 1970s, and his
ethnicity-oriented poems of the 1980s. Fred was a founding member of the
avant-garde TISH group, which helped turn Canadian poetry, in the West
in particular, to a focus on language. He has said that his "writing has
been sustained, primarily, by two interests: racial hybridity and the
local."
Most of Wah's early work is out of print. This collection allows readers
to (re)discover this groundbreaking work. The volume contains:
Lardeau (1965)
Mountain (1967)
Among (1972)
Tree (1972)
Earth (1974)
Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975)
Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek (1980)
Owner's Manual (1981)
Breathin' My Name with a Sigh (1981)
Grasp the Sparrow's Tail (1982)
Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985)
Rooftops (1988)
So Far (1991)
The collection has been organized according to a chronology of
composition (rather than a chronology of original publication): this
reveals new connections and thematic trajectories in the body of work as
a whole, and makes the book an eminently "teachable" volume. The book
includes full-colour facsimiles of two early books, Earth and Tree,
reproduced to show the "hands-on" object-based aspect of chapbook
publishing.
