Groundswell: The Best of Above/Ground Press, 1993–2003

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Since 1993, rob mclennan has been a force in the small press scene in
Canada, an indefatigable editor, promoter, and publisher, as well as a
poet with a growing reputation. It was in that year that he started
above/ground press, with its chapbooks, individual poem broadsheets, and
various issues of STANZAS magazine, all of which are distributed
everywhere he can get them, which includes everywhere he travels in his
yearly cross-country jaunts.

Groundswell collects a wide-ranging and eclectic smattering from the
press’s first decade, and an entertaining and wildly divergent
compilation it is: prose, poetry, illustrations, a sample of everything
mclennan has brought into his capacious literary maw over that time.

Different readers will have their own favourites, but I doubt there’s
anyone out there who won’t find a goodly portion of this volume
entertaining or provocative, or both. There’s fine work by Dennis
Cooley, John Newlove, Stephanie Bolster, Claire Latremouille, Lori
Emerson, Barry McKinnon, and Gil McEvoy, among others. But those names
only begin to suggest the wide net mclennan casts in his search for new
writing. Well-known names like George Bowering and Victor Coleman sit
side by side with lesser-known writers like Kath MacLean and Michael
Londry, and this is the point of his enterprise.

So many of above/ground press’s productions are ephemeral; that seems
to be the point. Nevertheless, it is definitely a good thing that
Groundswell has gathered such a large and diverse representation of its
varied publications during its first 10 years. It’s clear there will
be a need for another such anthology at the end of the next 10.