Andrew Loman

Memorial University’s Department of English is delighted to welcome celebrated poet, novelist, essayist, and dramatist George Elliott Clarke to Memorial University. Dr. Clarke will read from Canticles, the lyric-styled epic-in-progress he describes as his magnum opus. A brilliant fusion of Dante’s Divine Comedy and Pound’s Cantos, Canticles “views History as a web of imperialism, enslavement, and insurrection” as described by a fiery array of witnesses, from Cleopatra to Sally Hemings, from Napoléon, brooding on the revolution in Saint Domingue, to W. E. B. Du Bois, reflecting on John Brown, Melville’s meteor of the US Civil War.

Canada’s 7^th Parliamentary Poet Laureate, Clarke is the author of Whylah Falls, Execution Poems, Beatrice Chancy, and The Motorcyclist. He will read on Thursday, October 26, at 8 p.m. in Arts 1046, on the first floor of the Arts and Administration Building. Admission is free.