In the Plague Year is a book about living through the Covid-19 pandemic, when a coronavirus and its variants swept around the globe. In a remarkable suite of poems, William New reveals how, from March 2020 to March 2021, people coped with the threat. This is a book about love and death, laughter and loss, the price of isolation, and the cost of staying alive.
This pandemic was no minor unease, and this book is no workaday diary: it's a powerful record of people's lives as a new pandemic vocabulary became the idiom of the day. In these poems, people prove to be both dismissive and empathetic; officials react both creatively and slowly; institutions adapt or fail; not everyone survives.
Other writers have recorded the impact of plague on human history---think of Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, or Samuel Pepys's account of the Black Death in London, or Albert Camus' tale of cholera in The Plague: 'But what does it mean, the plague? It's life after all.'
In the Plague Year contrasts those who (in Camus's terms) see pestilence as 'a bogey of the mind' and those who see that 'there are sick people and they need curing.' New's poems are fresh, witty, serious, and sensitive―a powerful personal documentary that testifies to the strength of community.
"What is it that poetry can do in the face of danger, disease and death, not to mention war and genocide? What are the aims and possible contributions poetry can make in the face of such crises? In addition to being a call to action, poetry can also be a source of healing. It flies under the radar, nests in the ear, and can alter our chemistry, our way of thinking. How does it do this? It employs rhythmic strategies and economies of language that slow time down, make us wince, curse, laugh, weep or rejoice by using the rhythms of ordinary speech, heightened by syllabic stress patterns, surprising imagery, and acoustic pleasures such as the repetition of vowels and consonants, all of which slow us down, make us pause, consider, and experience what has been called 'felt time.' W.H. (Bill) New delivers much of this verbal richness in spades, not just in poetry, but also throughout his writings. He’s always alert to the multiple meanings and connotations in words, in books for young readers such as Vanilla Gorilla, Llamas in the Library, and Sam Swallow and the Riddleworld League, important nonfiction works for nerds and academics like me, including Articulating West, Borderlands, and A History of Canadian Literature. An embarrassment of riches. Not surprisingly, given his Protean capacities, he has also, since retiring from the University of British Columbia, become a prolific and gifted poet with at least ten collections of verse to his credit. New writes of tedium, tempers lost, rumours, false alarms, dashed hopes and signs: 'so much impedes us: / the politics of rage, contagious fear, the sad smut / of bullying smoke, the solid bulk / of invisible walls.' But he also sees and remembers the vitality and resilience ready to explode at a moment’s notice, at the first signs of improvement or opening up. 'Maybe we’ve / lost our taste for the politics of this pandemic, / maybe we’re numbed by statistics.' Are these poems, he asks, 'an obituary for a lost year'? No, they reflect the necessity of recall, of recording, the literary rescue work that takes the time required to give this epoch the permanence of art. ---Gary Geddes, The Ormsby Review
William New was born in 1938 in Vancouver, British Columbia, the city where he currently lives. A graduate of the University of British Columbia and the University of Leeds, and a prize-winning teacher and writer, he was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal in 2004, and for his services to creative and critical writing he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006.His books of history and literary commentary range from Articulating West (1972) to Land Sliding (1997), A History of Canadian Literature (2nd ed., 2003), and several studies of poetry, the short story, irony, and postcolonial narrative, as in Dreams of Speech and Violence (1987) and Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form (1999). Editor of the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002), he has also studied how the personal and the local affect political attitudes, as in Borderlands (1998) and Grandchild of Empire (2003).William New's creative works include five books for children, from Vanilla Gorilla 1998) to the internationally honoured The Year I Was Grounded (2008); and his poetry collections range from Science Lessons (1996) to Underwood Log (2004, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award), YVR (2011, winner of the City of Vancouver Award), and New & Selected Poems (2015).
