W.H. New - Vancouver poet

This will be a bit of an overview post about W.H. New, and I expect to write two separate reviews a bit down the road for two of New's collections.  I realize I am still settling in to Vancouver a bit and learning about the local literary scene, but it took me nearly a year to even hear about W.H. New, who is probably the most prominent, active Vancouver poet. Certainly, the most famous Vancouver poet (in the sense of someone who had their entire career in the lower mainland) is Pat Lowther, and there are several famous poets who lived at least part of the time in Vancouver (Earle Birney and Milton Acorn spring to mind, as well as Margaret Atwood, though she was only here for a year).  There is even John Donlan who lives half the year in Vancouver and works at the Vancouver Public Library (review of his latest collection here).  But I still think New claims the title as the most prominent, active, full-time Vancouver poet.

I found out about him somewhat by chance when I was looking through the paper and saw that his latest collection YVR was nominated for the 2012 City of Vancouver Book Award, and which in fact he went on to win (YVR wins).  I'd like to think I would have come across the book browsing the poetry shelves of the Burnaby Library, but I can't be sure that would have happened.  In any case, I was particularly likely to pick up the book once I had heard of it, as I was deeply immersed in a project that required me to gather poems on the topic of transportation.  As it so happens, the airport itself plays a very minor role in the collection (and I don't believe there is any air travel mentioned or implied), but it is still quite an interesting piece of work.  I will be reviewing it soon.

New has nine other poetry collections out, as well as several children's books and critical essays on Canadian literature.  The poetry collections are Science Lessons (1996), Raucous (1999), Stone | Rain (2001), Riverbook and Ocean (2002), Night Room (2003), Underwood Log (2004), Touching Ecuador (2006), Along a Snake Fence Riding (2007), and The Rope-maker's Tale (2009).  (Thank you, Wikipedia)

My favourites are Stone | Rain and YVR.  I had trouble getting into the longer book-length poems Along a Snake Fence Riding and The Rope-maker's Tale.  They reminded me a lot of Yeats's attempts to fuse poetry and plays, which never worked for me.  To some degree my attention span has shortened, particularly when it comes to poetry, and I no longer like poems that span more than 3 pages tops, although if they are true multi-part poems or a suite of poems forming a longer poem, I can usually bear reading them.  I don't know if this preference (or anti-preference) will shift back.  It seems somewhat unlikely as I no longer have to read any literature if I don't want to.  One of the up-sides of no longer being a student...