news | Thursday July 2, 2015

JAMIE REID 1941–2015

With heavy hearts and immense gratitude for his contributions to the literary landscape, we join the Canadian and British Columbian poetry communities in mourning the recent passing of Jamie Reid. Jamie Reid was born in Timmins, Ontario in 1941, and passed away in late June 2015.

At the University of British Columbia, Reid met Warren Tallman and together with George Bowering, Fred Wah, and several other writers, founded TISH in 1961; they would later become collectively known as the Tish poets. In the latter half of the 1960s, Reid organized Vancouver’s first Be-In, a gathering of activists following the example of a similar event in San Francisco. In 1967 he withdrew to the countryside of the Okanagan, where he wrote his first book of poems, The Man Whose Path Was on Fire (1969), which took the Canadian literary scene by storm. Reid then travelled to central Canada and, in his words, became a fierce communist for almost twenty years. Reid’s poetic work is fiercely intelligent, fearlessly incisive, and always politically charged. His recent work includes I. Another. The Space Between (Talon, 2004).

Read more about Reid on ABC Bookworld.