"Most long poems contain lyric occasions. Here is an amazingly sustained lyric that contains traces of other commodities." -Robert Kroetsch Sheila Murphy and Douglas Barbour extend their singular poetic vision of that elusive third I/eye in Continuations 2. The new lyric voice sustained (within) these labyrinthine verses does so by virtue of its authors' pitch-perfect collaborative process. For ten years they have kept their song alive via email, pulsing jazz-like variations and haunting repetitions back and forth from Arizona to Alberta, all the while adhering to that taut stanza of six lines. Readers who admire Barbour and Murphy's past innovations, or any poetry that gracefully exceeds its reach, will enjoy Continuations 2.

"The strength of this book is in its quick-change artistry, the sensation of flux that is continuous, and capable at any moment of erupting into epiphany or surprise." Roo Borson Across great distances and a panorama shaped by words, poets Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy began writing in collaboration. Tapped to technology's dance across paper, with thoughts like bright colours coursing across screens, Continuations emerged as the product of a new creator, a "third individual," who writes differently from either poet. Words shapeshifted and poets transformed, Continuations is an intriguing addition to the growing field of collaborative poetry in North American literature.

first snow falling slow hangs in the air a curtain drifting there thickening sight -"Winter" In this new collection, Douglas Barbour experiments with what he calls "rhythmically intense open form." Listen. If presents technically innovative poetry that invites the reader to join in some serious play. Barbour's vivid, ekphrastic poems engage an ongoing conversation among artworks-not only classic paintings but also popular music-while his lyric poems astutely, accessibly evoke places, moments, and feelings. This is poetry that takes up language both as the already-said and as a playground for brilliant technique. Leaping from love to landscapes, politics to jazz, Keats to Milne to Monk, these poems yearn to be spoken aloud for the pure joy of sound.

You are about to read a book like no other. Bloody Jack is a collection about the making and unmaking of story, of poetry and of history. Based loosely on the life of John Krafchenko, a notorious Manitoban outlaw, the poems of Bloody Jack turn fact and fiction upside down and inside out. Dennis Cooley has added more than a dozen new poems to this revised edition and Douglas Barbour has written an introduction. By turns earthy and earnest, soulful and sly, Bloody Jack is a rollicking, fun-filled riot of a volume by one of Canada's favourite poets. "Bloody Jack is back again, bigger, bolder, sweeter and even more outrageous." -David Arnason