A Temporary Stranger is comprised of three sections: Homages, Fake Poems, and Recollections. In Homages we find poems of reverence and honour, tributes to writers who had opened up the world of poetry to Jamie. There are poems to Spicer, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Francis Ponge, Tristan Tzara and others. At the centre of A Temporary Stranger are the Fake Poems, so called because "There is no art on earth that can fully represent the exact and flowing experience of viewing stone within the flow of water and the waving light within the water and around the stone, and the subsequent sense of awe and beauty that arises in the interaction between the seer and the seen... . In that sense, all art is fake... " The third section, Recollections, is an assemblage of articles paeans, really - to Robin Blaser, bill bissett, Warren Tallman, John Newlove, Curt Lang, Nellie McClung, Artie Gold, Kim Goldberg, Kate Braid, and others. Here, as friend and editor Karl Siegler states in his Foreword, "we encounter memory-not as a form of nostalgia for a bygone golden age of a romanticised pastoral arcadia ... but as an historical record of who did what when, and to what end, throughout the counterculture revolution that shaped the lives of Jamie Reid and his companions over the past six decades."
Author Biography:
Jamie Reid was born in Timmins, Ontario in 1941. A writer, activist, and arts organizer, Reid was a member of the original five-member editorial board of tish, the Vancouver poetry newsletter at UBC, in 1961. His first collection of poems, The Man Whose Path Was on Fire, was published by Talonbooks in 1969. A short time later he joined the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) and stopped writing for twenty-five years in favour of political activism. Reid returned to poetry and cultural criticism in the late 1980s, with a special interest in jazz expressed in many of his works. In 1994 he published Prez: A Homage to Lester Young, and in 1997 a new collection of poetry, Mad Boys. In 2002 he released Diana Krall: The Language of Love, a biography of jazz musician Diana Krall and in 2004 Talonbooks published I. Another. The Space Between: Selected Poems. In 2009 he published the chapbook, Homages (Pooka Press), which is included as one section of A TEMPORARY STRANGER (Anvil Press, 2017).
