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The Encantadas What began as a series of poems about the Galapagos Islands (The Enchanted Isles) and a tribute to Herman Melville has become a lifelong obsession for Robert Allen. Originally serialized over four books and two decades his epic long poem The Encantadas will now be published in its entirety by conundrum press. The poem contains three narrative threads and is in fact a kind of novel. The first section tells the tale of an oceanographer named Jack who undergoes rapture in the deep ocean but must return to the swamps of Quebec's Eastern Townships to confront his past. The second section concerns Teddy the tap-dancing turtle who is Jack's body double. In the final section Jack returns to the seas to smuggle wine. The poem is structured in a nine-line three-stanza form echoing the work of Allen's mentor in the seventies A.R. Ammons but also poets such as Wallace Stevens and Christopher Dewdney. Important formal elements of the poem are quick cuts, interruptions, discontinuities and abrupt changes in speaker. The Encantadas is a tour de force from one of Canada's most accomplished poets. Robert Allen is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose including the novels Napoleon's Retreat and The Hawryliw Process and the books of poetry in which The Encantadas was serialized: Magellan's Clouds, Ricky Ricardo Suites and Standing Wave. Born in Bristol, England he was educated at the University of Toronto and Cornell University. He is the editor of the literary journal Matrix and teaches creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal. "Lively and unquestionably gifted...." "A work of sustained, unrelenting, unmercifully protracted brilliance."
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