Everything Colin Browne has made up or invented in The Shovel seems written in prose; everything in it he has unearthed”from research, the stories of others and source textsappears as poetry. In this extraordinary book, he has inverted the way we have been defining and privileging forms of language in English for the last century; self-expression becomes prosaic, the recording of history, poetic.While The Shovel contains a range of styles and voiceseverything from concrete poetry to recollections of things past in tranquility” to delightfully humorous accounts of the poet’s accidental encounters with prominent philosophersthis book lives and sings through its epic passages. Ezra Pound defined the epic as a poem containing history,” and in these necessary poems Browne is a restless prowler through history’s layers, sudden veerings and terrible, wonderful intersections. The Shovel is a book composed in wartime, an act of reckoning, a record of unkept anniversaries and possible histories (in texts devoted to the likes of Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Linton Garner). In exhuming the mesopelagic shades of the 20th century, The Shovel collapses, at last, the reigning fiction of time.Every age demands a poetry to contain it, and here Colin Browne takes a measure of both the privileges and the appalling costs of service and citizenship, from colonial British Columbia to World War I Mesopotamia.

The Shovel

Literature & Fiction

Browne, Colin

Poetry

Talonbooks

In these passionate poems, this long poem, there is a story (there are stories) which a reader mines out of a landscape of language moulded under great pressure and eloquent of the stresses that formed it. This is non-representational work of great concentration and beauty."The skill and intense ardor of the mind at work ... is delightful. The least one can learn from poetry that makes sweet music of the intelligence is that we can still measure, have measure." -- Fred Wah, Books in Canada

Abraham

Brick Books

During the groundbreaking Charles Edenshaw exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2013, poet Colin Browne found himself returning often to study three large argillite platters carved by the Haida master in the late 1800s. Produced several years apart, each depicts an identical scene at the same moment: two frightened figures in a canoe appear to be on a mission. One is the Raven, in supernatural form, brandishing a spear; the other, in the stern, is a human-like figure with a circular head. On one platter he holds a paddle; on the other, his arms are raised in a state of panic. He is the helmsman, known as Fungus, or Fungus Man, or Biscuit Man. The Raven and Fungus Man appear early on in the Haida epic poem Raven Travelling,” not long after the Raven releases human men from a clamshell. Their mission is to enable men and women to go forth and multiply. The three platters, celebrated not only for their craftsmanship but also for their insight into the psyche, are rarely brought together in one place, and the fact that Edenshaw returned, with a sense of humour, to this primal scene, suggests that the theme was as important to him as it was to his contemporary, Sigmund Freud. Browne launches his unexpected journey of discovery with a simple question: Who was Fungus, or Fungus Man, and why did he become the one responsible for the miracle of human procreation?” Every good story is an origin story and a mystery story and in Entering Time: The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw, Browne ranges through the fields of art history, literature, ethnology, and myth to discover a parallel history of modernism within one of the world’s most subtle and sophisticated artistic and literary cultures. The text is supplemented by an interview with visual artist Neil Campbell, whose recent paintings speak to Fungus Man’s art-historical echoes and contemporary relevance.

Entering Time: The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

I Had an Interesting French Artist to See Me This Summer: Emily Carr and Wolfgang Paalen in British Columbia brings together new research concerning the French/Austrian artist Wolfgang Paalen (19051959), and the great Canadian modernist, Emily Carr (18711945), both of whom dedicated their most productive years to what Paalen called the direct visualization of the forces which move our body and mind.” Accompanying an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery scheduled for July 1 to November 13, 2016, the catalog will tell the story of how both artists met in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1939, and how the creative vision of each one expanded in reaction to the landscape and the monumental art of the Northwest Coast First Nations. The catalog will present an essay by the scholar Colin Browne, ancillary archival materials, as well as full color reproductions of both early and late works by both artists as they moved toward their transcendent visions. With objects assembled from public and private collections internationally, this first pairing of these two modernist painters is being organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, and curated by Colin Browne.

I Had an Interesting French Artist to See Me This Summer: Emily Carr and Wolfgang Paalen in British Columbia

Figure 1 Publishing

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Browne, Colin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Browne, Colin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Browne, Colin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Shovel

Abraham

Entering Time: The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw

I Had an Interesting French Artist to See Me This Summer: Emily Carr and Wolfgang Paalen in British Columbia