Collected Poems

This spellbinding collection forms an essential document of Robert Bringhurst’s long career as one of Canada’s most adventurous artists and thinkers.

Over a career of more than half a century, Robert Bringhurst has become widely renowned as a polymath driven by intense curiosity and vast erudition. The American-born, BC-based artist and scholar has brought a background in linguistics, physics, architecture and comparative literature to bear on his groundbreaking work as an essayist, critic, historian, translator, typographer and poet.

Indeed, there is arguably no more powerful testament to Bringhurst’s deeply eclectic vision than this captivating collection, offering the full scope of his poetry, from the late ’60s to the present day. Here, modernist elements in early works are gradually refined into an approach that bypasses the self-exploration prevalent in contemporary poetry, and instead forms a framework to accommodate influences as historically and culturally diverse as ancient Greek and Chinese verse, the Bible and the stories of West Coast Indigenous Peoples, creating a timeless, borderless interplay. Even Bringhurst’s acclaimed contributions to the field of typography—culminating in his now classic 1992 book The Elements of Typographic Style—is represented in the global array of type interspersed here, from Hellenic to Hebrew and Chinese.

With their striking blend of lyric energy, formal daring and precision, the works in this long-awaited collection gather into a kind of career-spanning dialogue, reflecting one of Canada’s most remarkable creative minds.