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A Peeled Wand: Selected Poems of Anne Szumigalski offers a succinct, authoritative overview of the work of one of Canada's most remarkable and original poets. As Saskatchewan writer Elizabeth Philips points out in her introduction:

"Anne Szumigalski's poetry is infused with spaciousness, with the far-reaching intellectual and spiritual curiosity that supports the vaulting generosity of her imagination. In A Peeled Wand, the life of the imagination is not something fanciful, pyrotechnics that temporarily relieve us, or distract us, or otherwise reconcile us to the harsh exigencies of 'real life.' In Szumigalski's poetic universe, the life of the mind is the cosmic present, and we enter into this vast astonishment the moment we begin to read.

There is an extraordinary freedom in these poems, freedom to imagine other worlds, as well as worlds within worlds, and yet the work has an intimacy that is quintessentially human and ordinary, in the sense that the poems connect viscerally to the dailiness of human existence. It is this paradox, the union of the immediate and ever-changing with the everlasting, that sustains these poems, and makes them essential reading.

A Peeled Wand is both a distillation and reconfiguration of Anne Szumigalski's life's work. The poems have been arranged thematically into three sections. Roughly speaking, the first section has to do with childhood and that free access of invention that came so easily to Szumigalski's work. The second has to do with war and death, and the third with the spiritual, the urge to religiosity that, in this poet's work, is often shot through with humour -- leavened, in some way, with wit and sly insight."

The publication of A Peeled Wand brings Anne Szumigalski's finest poems back into print and allows a new generation to discover her work.