Gary Geddes’ bio

Geddes-150GARY GEDDES has written and edited more than 45 books and been the recipient of more than a dozen national and international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), Lt-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, and the Gabriela Mistral Prize. He lives on Thetis Island, BC.

The title poem of his new book, The Resumption of Play, shared first prize in the Malahat Review Long Poem competition. The jury described this poem as “compelling’ and “deeply necessary,” the urgent story of an Indian residential school survivor, complex, scarred and articulate, flashing with rage and mordant humour, which tackles the collision of Indigenous and Western systems of thought. It’s followed by elegies for the poet’s mother who died young, a sequence of monologues by Pound, Brodsky, Stravinsky and Diaghilev called “On Being Dead in Venice” and various short lyrics about Virginia Woolf, Bronwen Wallace and two poems set in a jail in Somalia.