Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems

When Phyllis Webb published Wilson’s Bowl in 1980, Northrop Frye hailed it as “a landmark in Canadian literature”: landmark, an event that marks a turning point in something (in this case, Canadian literature); and an instantly recognized feature of a landscape (in this case, the landscape of Canadian poetry). Wilson’s Bowl was Webb’s fifth volume of poetry. Three more followed and then she fell silent, turning from literature to abstract painting.

Peacock Blue compiles in a single volume all of Webb’s published, unpublished, and uncollected works from a writing career that spanned fifty years. It offers readers the opportunity to relish the arc of Webb’s entire poetic oeuvre, from the modernist lyricism of her early works, to the groundbreaking volume, Naked Poems (1965), in which Webb created for herself a new minimalist language; from Wilson’s Bowl to what Douglas Barbour calls “Webb’s loving and subversive engagement with the ghazal” in Water and Light (1984); and finally to the postmodernist prose poems of Hanging Fire (1990).

The concluding section of Peacock Blue contains almost fifty poems, some of which have never been published before. It also includes brilliant but forgotten poems and poetic surprises. Brenda Carr has suggested that one of Webb’s later essays, “Message Machine” (1990), “initiates a re-reading of her poetics and practice … Against her anxiety that she is a passive ‘message machine’ for masculinist culture.” However, as Carr points out, “Webb posits another possibility – ‘cross-dressing.’ She theorizes her mimicry of the male persona as analogous to a ‘masquerade’ or ‘street theatre’ and in so doing reconstructs even her earlier poems as a performative space in which agency is possible.” The truth of Carr’s insight becomes increasingly apparent to anyone who undertakes to read through Webb’s entire poetic output, gathered together, at last, in Peacock Blue.

Phyllis Webb was born in 1927 in Victoria, BC. She was educated at the University of British Columbia and McGill. The first major publication of her poetry was in Trio (1954), which included poetry by Eli Mandel and Gael Turnbull. For many years she worked as a writer and broadcaster for the CBC, where she created the radio program Ideas in 1965 and was its executive producer from 1967 to 1969. Webb served as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta from 1980 to 1981 and taught at the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, and the Banff Centre. She is a lifetime member of the League of Canadian Poets and currently resides on Salt Spring Island, BC.

Winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry for The Vision Tree: Selected Poems (1982) Phyllis Webb was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1992.

John F. Hulcoop received a BA and PhD from University College London. He emigrated to Canada in 1956 and taught in the English department at the University of British Columbia. Initially a nineteenth-century scholar, Hulcoop has published works on Robert Browning, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Truman Capote, and Virginia Woolf. A longtime critic of Phyllis Webb’s work, he edited and wrote the introduction to her Selected Poems 1954–65 (Talonbooks, 1971); he also wrote Phyllis Webb and Her Works (ECW Press, 1990).