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: A NEW CENTURY : It was the claim of Canadian poet Charles G.D. Roberts that Canadian Poetry was a young shoot which began to bud forth from the parent stem of English poetry in the early 1880s. It started under a happier history than the start of its American predecessor during the American Revolution(1775-1783). It developed more rapidly and attained by the 1930s an authentic separate existence. The poets of this first half century(1883-1933), according to Roberts, were all incorrigible and unrepentant idealists. Canadian poetry has been, of course, overshadowed by its great rivals, English and American poetry, but it was not obliterated by that poetry. At some time in the late 1940s, perhaps as early as 1933, my mother, another incorrigible idealist, began to write poetry. My mother was there at the start, although I'm sure she did not know it, the start of the second half of the first century of this new tradition of authentic poetry: Canadian. By 1983 and the start of the second century of authentic Canadian poetry, I like to think that I began to contribute to a distinctively Canadian poetry, even though I was living by then in Australia. : -Ron Price with thanks to Charles G. D. Roberts “Canadian Poetry in its Relation to The Poetry of England and America, March 18, 1933, in Canadian Poetry. : I had no idea in that winter : of a certain Tasmanian discontent1 : that I was about to take part : in the second century : of Canadian poetry : removed half a world away : as I was in the Antipodes. : Poetry seemed to grow slowly : in my hybrid heart : and did not seem to really : find its warm, inviting, home : until I neared fifty and lived : in the most remote city : on the planet.2 : Insensibly, there grew : that calm, coolness, : silent garden-growing mood. : A wooing of inspiration amidst : a constant habit of labour : brought a steady creep of ideas : out of my head which fell : naturally into shape or : were agonizingly located : and I was interminably doing, : doing.3 : 1 1980: my first poem : 2 Perth Western Australia : 3 This stanza draws from Rimbaud, Conrad and G.H. Mead. : Ron Price : May 16 2004

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