ISBN:
9781772014747
Pages: 126 pp
Pub. Date:
September 20 2023
Dimensions: 10.25" x 8.25" x 0.5625"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Poetry / POE024000
- ART / Women Artists
- ART / Canadian
- ART / Mixed Media
- POETRY / Canadian
- POETRY / Women Authors
Edited by Stephen Collis
Illustrated by Phyllis Webb
Contributions by Diana Hayes & Betsy Warland & Laurie White
First collection of visual work by renowed Canadian poet Phyllis Webb
A Dream in the Eye presents the paintings and photocollages of the brilliant poet Phyllis Webb, a major Canadian cultural figure from the 1950s through the 1980s. Webb published ten collections of poetry and prose and co-founded the CBC Radio program Ideas (in 1965). When “words abandoned” her in the early 1990s, she took up photography, photocollage, and eventually painting. Webb’s visual work in many ways responds to and expands upon concerns that she explored in her poetry: the natural world of the West Coast, global political strife, the artist’s struggle to express themself.
In addition to Webb’s seventy-four paintings and eighty collages, A Dream in the Eye includes probing introductory material by the book’s editor, Stephen Collis, and by art historian and curator Laurie White, as well as supplementary material, including some of Webb’s own reflections on her visual work, an essay by Betsy Warland, and a selection of poems written in response to Webb’s paintings by her long-time friend Diana Hayes.
A Governor General’s Award–winning poet and a member of the Order of Canada, Phyllis Webb was a major Canadian cultural figure from the 1950s through the 1980s, publishing ten celebrated collections of poetry and prose and co-founding the CBC Radio program Ideas (in 1965). When “words abandoned” her in the early 1990s and she was no longer able to write, she took up photography, photocollage, and eventually painting.
Edited by Stephen Collis
Stephen Collis is the author of six books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize–winning On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010). His memoir, Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten, was published by Talonbooks in 2018. He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University. Collis was the 2019 recipient of the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, which is given to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work, and in anticipation of future contributions to Canadian poetry.
