New Life in Dark Seas: Brick Books 25

Alain Létourneau is a librarian in the J.N. Desmarais Library at
Laurentian University.

This wonderful anthology celebrates 25 years of the works of more than
70 writers published by Brick Books. Selections range from the
historical prose of Greg Curnoe (“What We Live On”) from
Deeds/Abstracts: The History of a London Lot (1995) and Dennis Lee’s
jazz verse from Riffs (1993), to the terpsichorean prose of Michael
Ondaatje from Elimination Dance/La danse éliminatoire (1991) and the
technically precise poetry of P.K. Page from Hologram: A Book of Glosas
(1994). Then there’s Michael Kenyon’s prose-poem fiction from Rack
of Lamb (1991) and Lynn Davies’s delightful prayer “Lord If You Had
a Lap.” The volume also features poems by Jan Zwicky (“Open
Strings”), Méira Cook (“Light Moving”), and Cherie Geauvreau
(“vocation”), among others, and includes some surprises, like the
collective work (a kind of cadavre exquis) of David White, Peggy
Dragisic, Patrick Deane, and Sheila McColm.

Over the years, Brick Books has established itself as a fine literary
house, its books earning many awards (most recently, three of the five
books nominated for the 1999 Governor General’s Award for poetry were
Brick Books, and its Songs for Relinquishing the Earth by Jan Zwicky
won). New Life in Dark Seas suitably commemorates this quarter-century
achievement.