Active for over 40 years with the Communist Party of Canada, Bert Whyte was a journalist, an underground party organizer and soldier during World War II, and a press correspondent in Beijing and Moscow. But any notion of him as a Communist Party hack would be mistaken. Whyte never let leftist ideology get in the way of a great yarn. In Champagne and Meatballs--a memoir written not long before his death in Moscow in 1984--we meet a cigar-smoking rogue who was at least as happy at a pool hall as at a political meeting. His stories of bumming across Canada in the 1930s, of combat and comaraderie at the front lines in World War II, and of surviving as a dissident in troubled times make for compelling reading. The manuscript of Champagne and Meatballs was brought to light and edited by historian Larry Hannant, who has written a fascinating and thought-provoking introduction to the text. Brash, irreverent, informative, and entertaining, Whyte's tale is history and biography accompanied by a wink of his eye--the left one, of course.

The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.

'This masterly work ought to be The Elizabethan Encyclopedia, and no less.' - Cahiers Elizabethains Edmund Spenser remains one of Britain's most famous poets. With nearly 700 entries this Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive one-stop reference tool for: * appreciating Spenser's poetry in the context of his age and our own * understanding the language, themes and characters of the poems * easy to find entries arranged by subject.

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"Canadian Communism is an original and scholarly history of the Communist Party of Canada (1921-1981). This work puts the Party into an international setting and compares it with similar movements in Great Britain, the United States, and France. The CPC was organized by Canadian socialists influenced by the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and its leader Vladimir Lenin. They decided to become a section of the newly formed Communist International and to follow its guidelines. But the rise to power of Joseph Stalin, after the death of Lenin in 1924, changed the outlook and tactics of the Communist International and its affiliates. Penner traces the specific way these changes affected the CPC at every important stage in Canadian and world events. He shows how the frequent battles within the Party, and especially among the leaders, were in response to directives from the Communist International or the Soviet party. Penner credits the Canadian Communists with contributing to the building of the trade union movement, with assistance to the unemployed during the thirties, and with helping Spain's democratic government fight the fascists during the civil war. These activities, often undertaken in the face of state repression, resulted in the emergence of such popular figures as Tim Buck, Norman Bethune, Jacob Penner, J. B. Salsberg, A. A. MacLeod, and Dorise Nielsen. Penner presents a new evaluation of the Canadian Communists' tactics, the popular front, the alliance with the Liberals in the trade union movement, and the bitter conflict with the CCF. He describes the year-long debate within the Party over the Khrushchev revelations about the brutal nature of Stalin's rule, a debate that split all the Communist parties in the West and from which they have never recovered. Norman Penner has drawn the material for his book from major Canadian archives, as well as public and private collections in Britain and the U.S. He has talked with Communists and ex-Communists in all three countries and has also drawn from his own material and recollections." --

This is the highly anticipated second collection from Sandy Pool, whose debut book of poetry Exploding into Night (Guernica, 2009) was short-listed for the Governor General's Award for poetry in 2010. In the early 1900s, thousands of women between the ages of 11 and 45 were employed painting glow-in-the-dark watch faces in factories across North America. Several years after leaving the plant, the dial painters developed mysterious medical conditions. These included complete necrosis of the jaw, severe anaemia, intense arthritic like pains, and spontaneous bone fractures. Though clearly ailing from the use of radium based paint, the women were intentionally misdiagnosed as having syphilis. Many women died in shame before ever receiving compensation. Sandy Pool's second book, is equal parts dramatic elegy and poetic inquisition written in seven distinct voices. Drawing from the historical record of the 'radium women' and other instances of historical erasure, the work urges us to engage deeply with questions of time and women's history. The book confronts Bakhtin's notorious questions: What happens to time when history is being erased? What happens when time takes on flesh?

InSkin Like Mine Garry Gottfriedson offers a suite of poems that peel away the skin of contemporary first nations society to reveal an inside view of individual experience. Gottfriedson speaks of "minds full of anticipation" yet with "tongues pointing arrowheads." Today's youth, he says, are "afraid of themselves." He finds that both individuals and bands end in "tangles," that they write "nonsense words in the sand" or exploit images painted on rocks, those "the postmodern Indian calls / visual poetic expression." As the collection continues, however, Gottfriedson's love for the land emerges. He draws attention to the rape of the natural environment, the skin of Mother Earth, through clear-cut logging. He speaks of the damage caused by the pine beetle, of "forests being / eaten from the inside out." And here it is that Gottfriedson introduces the mysterious Horsechild, who is to prepare the drying racks for the returning salmon "so that beneath your skin / the mountains will be forever abundant": a prayer for us to protect the migrating salmon on their multi-year cycles, to protect the bears and eagles that feast upon them, so as to assure that the transformations will continue, that there will be abundance for both humans and the earth itself.