introduction This anthology introduces readers to thirty-five poets they may never have read before, but will soon find unforgettable. For, at its strongest, Canadian poetry is fresh and familiar, new-voiced and well-grounded, resounding with the great ideas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Because of the variety of its many strengths, Canadian poetry has always been a challenge to characterise. It resembles both the American and British literatures alongside which it has developed, but maintains its uniqueness by being a hybrid of both, occupying a space between and often overpowered (but never overawed) by more populous traditions in literature and art. There are many brilliant, internationally unsung figures who warrant a morethan-provincial attention: how to define a common tradition of diversity, of the ‘in-between’ place? When P.K. Page, one of Canada’s most renowned and remarkable poets, passed away on 14 January 2010, her death did not register in any way with the British press, despite Page’s international reputation and English heritage and birth. We, as editors, read this event as an omen: an opportunity to call attention to work that has been overlooked for too long. The reasons for Canada’s relative lack of presence on the international poetry scene are multifaceted, due for the most part to the country’s ‘in-between’ geopolitical space, but also to a nationalism that developed in the last forty years based on cultural ‘survival’. In the rush to distinguish Canadian literature’s uniqueness, many Canadian critics have sought to disentangle it too readily from both British and American models. Instead, a poetry has been posited that is at once derived from certain free verse, anti-imperialistic tendencies inherited from the Americans (the most successful of post-colonial cultures), while at the same time there has been a movement to ‘garrison’ the nation against overpowering British and American influences. (The concept of the ‘garrison mentality’, originally formulated by the critic Northrop Frye in his writings on Canada, has become a common theme of xiii