The Collected Poems of William Hawkins

Author: William Hawkins

Publisher: Chaudiere Books (2015)

Born in 1940 in Ottawa, Ontario, legendary poet and musician William Hawkins was one of the most important artists to emerge from Canada’s capital. He published six books from 1964-1974, attended the 1963 UBC Summer Poetry Seminar, organized poetry readings at Ottawa’s infamous Le Hibou Coffeehouse, wrote songs and performed in bands (with the likes of Bruce Cockburn, David Wiffen, Darius Brubeck, and others), and published widely in Canada’s most important little magazines of the 1960s before retreating into silence in the 1970s and working as a cab driver until his retirement in 2012. Hawkins died in 2016. The Collected Poems of William Hawkins gathers Hawkins’s complete output. His books are printed alongside previously unpublished and uncollected poems including early magazine publications, the long-lost book Sweet and Sour Nothings, poems from the time of his extended silence, as well as all work produced since his gradual re-appearance in the 1990s. Edited by Cameron Anstee, this volume presents the generous, defiant, idiosyncratic, and compelling work of William Hawkins in its entirety.