Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten eBook
$18.00
Almost Islands is a powerfully introspective memoir of the author’s friendship with legendary Canadian poet Phyllis Webb – now in her nineties and long enveloped in silence – and his regular trips to see her.
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About this eTextbook
Almost Islands is a powerfully introspective memoir of the author’s friendship with legendary Canadian poet Phyllis Webb – now in her nineties and long enveloped in silence – and his regular trips to see her. It is an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and chance, location, colonization, and climate change – the struggle that is writing, and the end of writing. I go to see her because she is poetry’s old crone and I am seeking.
I go to her – usually three, four times a year – because it is a small ministration I can perform for her, and for her poetry, as she slowly reaches into the finite – a long, slow embrace of nothing … If living is a process of learning how to die, then is writing a process of learning how to stop writing? I go in search of lost words, in search of the hoped-for defence against the loss of words, drawn to the shaping sounds of fate and mortality. A meticulous collection of poetic, political, and philosophical digressions, Almost Islands weaves numerous themes together.
At its crux lies a literary project: to build upon and extend Webb’s exposition of a “poetic” sense of the political, by proposing a political agent, the “Biotariat,” a government of Life, that is both human and more than human – arrived at after following as many pathways as possible through Webb’s own reading and thought. Ultimately, Almost Islands is a book obsessed with the problem of Webb’s not writing, and the implications of this for a writer like Collis who, in his own words, may be writing “too much” – as well as the wider social, political, and world-historical implications of withdrawal, self-silencing, and not-doing.
Publication details
- Author: Stephen Collis
- Publisher: Talonbooks
- eText ISBN: 9781772014143, 1772014141
- Print ISBN: 9781772012071, 1772012076
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- A licensed digital edition of this title, supplied as PDF or EPUB. The format is set by the publisher, so email us the ISBN before ordering and we will confirm which one it is.
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- This is a digital edition. Nothing is printed, packed or posted, and there is no delivery charge.
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About this eTextbook
Almost Islands is a powerfully introspective memoir of the author’s friendship with legendary Canadian poet Phyllis Webb – now in her nineties and long enveloped in silence – and his regular trips to see her. It is an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and chance, location, colonization, and climate change – the struggle that is writing, and the end of writing. I go to see her because she is poetry’s old crone and I am seeking.
I go to her – usually three, four times a year – because it is a small ministration I can perform for her, and for her poetry, as she slowly reaches into the finite – a long, slow embrace of nothing … If living is a process of learning how to die, then is writing a process of learning how to stop writing? I go in search of lost words, in search of the hoped-for defence against the loss of words, drawn to the shaping sounds of fate and mortality. A meticulous collection of poetic, political, and philosophical digressions, Almost Islands weaves numerous themes together.
At its crux lies a literary project: to build upon and extend Webb’s exposition of a “poetic” sense of the political, by proposing a political agent, the “Biotariat,” a government of Life, that is both human and more than human – arrived at after following as many pathways as possible through Webb’s own reading and thought. Ultimately, Almost Islands is a book obsessed with the problem of Webb’s not writing, and the implications of this for a writer like Collis who, in his own words, may be writing “too much” – as well as the wider social, political, and world-historical implications of withdrawal, self-silencing, and not-doing.
Publication details
- Author: Stephen Collis
- Publisher: Talonbooks
- eText ISBN: 9781772014143, 1772014141
- Print ISBN: 9781772012071, 1772012076
What you receive
- A licensed digital edition of this title, supplied as PDF or EPUB. The format is set by the publisher, so email us the ISBN before ordering and we will confirm which one it is.
- Delivered to the email address on your order as a secure download link, usually within minutes and always within 24 hours of payment.
- Download links do not expire and there is no cap on re-downloads. Readable on any computer, tablet or phone, online or offline.
- This is a digital edition. Nothing is printed, packed or posted, and there is no delivery charge.
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