Collected Poetry of Carol Shields

Carol Shields (1935–2003) was an American-born award-winning Canadian novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, and poet.Nora Foster Stovel is professor emerita, University of Alberta, and the author and editor of several books including Divining Margaret Laurence and Recognition and Revelation: Margaret Laurence's Short Nonfiction Writings.

"The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields will send Shields's followers back to her novels with a new understanding of their metaphoric and imagistic richness. Scholars and those familiar with her work will be grateful that the book has awakened them to another side of a writer of such renown." Lorna Crozier, University of Victoria and author of Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats)"The poems in this book are witty, sparked by Shields's signature interests in gender, class, and the frames of subjectivity; they are smartly formal and, like her novels, often subversively feminist. It is intriguing to see the kind of breadth that Shields brought to multiple projects throughout her poetic practice and this book has the ring of a well-kept secret." Tanis MacDonald, Wilfrid Laurier University and author of Mobile"[Shields's] last novel, Unless, of which I was the first informal editor, starts with an image she tried out in an early poem: "Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head." We hear that pane laughing while she cleans it with her recipe for window cleaner, a little sugar a little vinegar. Carol Shields loved clarity in writing, her highest praise for "crisp" and "clear." Now wait, for the glass crash is a lurking caveat. Surprise is what she practised so diligently in her poems and what carried over into her prose … ." The Ormsby Review "Nearly twenty years after [Sheilds'] death, we have the welcome edition of her Collected Poetry. With the annotated addition of unpublished poems, Stovel's volume reveals the intricate web of Shields's humane creative intelligence." British Journal of Canadian Studies