Wrestling with Cadence
Essays on Writing and Intuition
Dennis Lee
About
A career-spanning collection of critical and personal essays from a titan of Canadian literature.
Building and expanding on his previous volume of essays Body Music, Dennis Lee looks back on what has driven him as a poet: the mysterious germinating force he calls cadence. At once a stealth memoir and an essential study of how a poet writes, Wrestling with Cadence is the definitive history of a beloved Canadian poet in his own words.
Praise for Dennis Lee
“One of the finest poets in the English language.”
— Quill & Quire
“Canada has produced many competent poets but few absolute masters. ... The Gods confirms the presence of a master: Dennis Lee.”
— Mark Abley, Maclean’s
“The trouble with Dennis Lee’s children’s rhymes is that they are unforgettable.”
— Margaret Atwood
“Constantly, throughout his work about intensely personal matters, Lee achieves perhaps the hardest quality for a poet to attain, a memorable directness and simplicity. Which is in turn a token of his preeminence.”
— Christopher Levenson, EVENT
“Lee, like every great poet, cannot be catalogued or filed under any given poetic category. He is an exponent of the real; his lines are essentially prophetic.”
— Gwendolyn MacEwen
“Dennis Lee’s poems are important to me above all because, more consistently than those of anyone else whose work I know, they manifest a full awareness of the poem as a form of musical score.”
— Denise Levertov, Descant
“An astonishing batch of poems – unwieldy, tough-minded, shot through with passages of knotty and uncompromising beauty.”
— Perry Nodelman, Winnipeg Free Press, reviewing Civil Elegies
“Civil Elegies is our Waste Land. ... It gave the city and the nation a sacramental landmark for a secular age.”
— Nick Mount
“One of the most extraordinary bodies of work in contemporary English poetry.”
— Paul Vermeersch
Dennis Lee
Dennis Lee is among the finest poets now working in English. The author of more than forty books, he is highly regarded for his meditative and erotic poetry, as well as his unforgettable collections for young people such as Alligator Pie. He wrote the song lyrics for Jim Henson’s hit children’s series, Fraggle Rock, and in 2001 was named Toronto’s first poet laureate. Heart Residence, his collected poems, was published in 2017. He lives in Toronto with his wife, the novelist Susan Perly.
Purchase
Wrestling with Cadence is available for pre-order through your local bookstore, Indigo, and Amazon.
Details
Published by Stonehewer Books, September 2025
234 Pages • Paperback • 5.5” x 8.5”