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Acknowledgements The work of turning a series of questions into a book requires the attention andgoodwill of manypeople over anumbersofyears,andImustthankthose who provided me with their assistance, scholarly and personal, during the years that I thought about, researched, composed, and revised this book. I owe a debt of thanks and acknowledgement to the many generous conversations I had with various scholars over the years this book was in development . Some of these conversations were limited to the page as I read the work of scholars of contemporary elegy whose books were so important to the generation and sustenance of my ideas. The works of Jahan Ramazani, W. David Shaw, and Melissa F. Zeiger were instrumental to this book, and I recommend their works to all readers who are interested in reading more about the dynamics and difficulties of the contemporary elegy. Initial research into the paternal elegy as written by Canadian female poets was supported by a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in 2003–2004. Further research into Dorothy Livesay’s paternal elegies in the Archives at the University of Manitoba was funded by a Research Grant from Wilfrid Laurier University in 2007. Wilfrid Laurier University also supported me with a Book Preparation Grant in 2012. I thank the people in the WLU Research Office and the University of Manitoba Archives for their assistance, as well as Paul Tiessen for our many conversations about Livesay. Cailen Swain at Oxford University Press and Brian Lam at Arsenal Pulp Press supplied prompt assistance in securing permission for me to republish portions of work by Jay Macpherson and Dorothy Livesay. Everyone at Wilfrid Laurier University Press was tremendously helpful, and I especially wish to thank Lisa Quinn for her v i i v i i i A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s calm, cool, and collected advice, and Leslie Macredie for leading me to the paintings of Erica Grimm-Vance, whose art adorns the cover of this book. For her supervision and application of perspicacious logic during my doctoral study, I thank Smaro Kamboureli. Jamie Dopp was the longeststanding member of my committee, and I thank him for his kindly eye and for his consistency. Misao Dean leaped to my rescue and onto my committee on short notice. Ingrid Holmberg of the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Victoria was marvellously willing to read poetry and quiz me on Ovid and Homer. Thanks also to Lynnette Hunter, Professor of Rhetoric and Performance in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, Davis for serving as external examiner for my dissertation defence. Thanks are also due to scholars whose discussions and recommendations were so valuable in the early days of my research. I thank Eric Miller for all our discussions about Anne Carson’s work, Dianne Chisholm for telling me about Zero Hour, and Iain Higgins for his patience and generosity . The students in my graduate seminars on the Canadian elegy, taught at Wilfrid Laurier University in the winter sessions of 2007 and 2009, kept me thinking about these texts, and their thoughtfulness and curiosity went a long way to convincing me of the resilience of my ideas. Special thanks to David Bentley at the University of Western Ontario for his work with modernist poetry, his editorship of the journal Canadian Poetry, and for smiling the first time I said the word “elegy” to him. Parts of this book were presented and discussed at numerous conferences and seminars, most frequently at the annual meeting of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, but also at University of British Columbia in 2002, and at the “Poetics and Public Culture” conference in honour of Frank Davey at the University of Western Ontario in 2005. I’d like to thank Ian Rae for his support of my work with Anne Carson’s texts, and the organizers, recommending readers, and audience members of all of these conferences for their support. Parts of the book are revised versions of previously published essays, and I wish to thank the editors and anonymous readers of those publications for their roles in encouraging this work at an early stage of its development . Early versions of some of these chapters appeared first in the following scholarly journals and I thank the editors of these publications for their interest and support: Chapter Two as “‘The Battle Done’: Reading the...

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