Carol Shields, best known for her fiction writing, received both the
Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General's Award for Fiction for her
novel The Stone Diaries. But she also wrote hundreds of poems over the
span of her career. The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields includes three
previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems,
ranging from the early 1970s to Shields's death in 2003. In a detailed
introduction and commentary, Nora Foster Stovel contextualizes these
poems against the background of Shields's life and oeuvre and the
traditions of twentieth-century poetry. She demonstrates how poetry
influenced and informed Shields's novels; many of the poems, which
constitute miniature narratives, illuminate Shields's fiction and serve
as the testing ground for metaphors she later employed in her prose
works. Stovel delineates Shields's career-long interest in character and
setting, gender and class, self and other, actuality and numinousness,
as well as revealing her subversive feminism, which became explicit in
Reta Winter's angry (unsent) letters in Unless and in the stories of
poet Mary Swann and Daisy Goodwill in Swann and The Stone Diaries. The
first complete collection of her poetry, this volume is essential for
all readers of Carol Shields. Stovel's detailed annotations, based on
research in the Carol Shields fonds at Library and Archives Canada,
reveal the poems in all their depth and resonance, and the dignity and
consequence they afford to ordinary people.
