Overture

Canadian poet, intellectual, and constitutional expert F. R. "Frank" Scott helped found the first Canadian social democratic party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and its successor, the New Democratic Party. In addition to his political accomplishments, Scott won Canada's top literary prize, the Governor General's Award, twice, once for poetry and once for non-fiction. In this collection of Modernist verse, Scott attempts to emancipate Canadian poetry from traditional methods of poetry writing. The last poem in the book, Villanelle For Our Time, was set to music by Leonard Cohen and recorded for his album Dear Heather.