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The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: On Poetry, Poets, and Psyche
BOOKS
Farewell, Darkness: Selected Poems |
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Ekstasis Editions, Farewell, Darkness: Selected Poems includes work from fifty years of Stephen Morrissey's published poetry. Morrissey was born in Montreal, the city where he still lives. He was educated at McGill University and taught for many years at Champlain Regional College. Morrissey won the Peterson Poetry Award while at McGill. In the mid-1970s Morrissey was a member of the Véhicule Poets, a group of poets who organized readings at Véhicule Art Gallery and helped bring a rebirth of innovative poetry to Montreal. He has published ten books of poetry, several chapbooks, and two volumes on poetry and poetics. The Stephen Morrissey Fonds, 1963-2014, are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections of the McLennan Library of McGill University. Morrissey’s themes, as he writes in the preface, are "the transience of life, family, grief at losing close family members, and romantic love"; he is a poet of passion and insight into the human condition. |
Critical praise for Farewell Darkness: Selected Poems
"Poetry is nothing if not passionate", as Morrissey writes in the preface to Farewell, Darkness. "Passion, not the intellect, not fashion, not popularity, not what other people are doing defines poetry." Morrissey's own refusal to tailor his writing to "fashion" is what gives his poems their resonance and their emotional accessibility: by affirming a shared human experience, they can be read again and again, with the unabated pleasure of a first reading.
What ultimately matters most is "The Great Reconfiguration" when Morrissey's existence underwent a radical reorganization due to a single event, that being the premature death of his father. For Morrissey, he found the single myth to define his life for years. Instead of "The Trees Unknowing", the Biblical story of the Garden myth was the fall from innocence into William Blakean experience. "It was the birth of my soul as a poet; it was the beginning of my journey as a poet".
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