Description

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Richard Harrison’s The Hero of the Play has been in print continuously for twenty-five years, with a tenth anniversary edition released in 2004. 25 is a celebration of this fact, as well as a meditation on twenty-five years of hockey poetry. This collection is a cataloguing of the way the game has woven itself into the life of the Governor General’s Award–winning poet, from childhood to fatherhood to death. It is a reflection on how the game has become such a large part of Canadian identity, shifting and changing with the times. In 25, Harrison captures the grace of the player in fluid lines, sketches the arc of the play and delivers the myth of the frozen pond to our human reality.

About the Author

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Richard Harrison is the author of seven books of poetry including On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood, which won the Governor General’s Award for English-language Poetry and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry in Alberta. 25: Hockey Poems New and Revised celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Hero of the Play, the first book of poetry to be launched at the Hockey Hall of Fame. Richard’s poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic, and his Governor General’s Award-winning volume was translated into Italian. He has read widely in Canada and the United States, and his work has been featured on many TV and radio broadcasts including Adrienne Clarkson Presents and Peter Gzowski’s Morningside. His essays, as well as writing on his work, have appeared in several academic publications, the Globe and Mail, the Manchester Guardian and the New York Times. In 1995, Richard was the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Calgary; he has since made Calgary his home and teaches English and Creative Writing at Mount Royal University.