Uncommon Wealth

The poems and lyrics in this book were written in English over a period of 400 years by 500 authors from countries and territories on almost every continent.

This range offers readers ways of seeing histories of poetic practice and changing forms of poetic expression in English from various regional, national and international perspectives.

Beginning with the early colonial period, British, American and Canadian poetry is represented alongside the work of poets from the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand, Africa, South Asia, South America, Europe and indigenous peoples' communities.

It is intended that by reading poets among their continental and transcontinental relations, awareness should be promoted of what poems mean by allowing their complex histories and languages to enter post-colonial space. In addition to classic works in the canon of poetry in English - Shakespeare sonnets, Bradstreet's "Before The Birth Of One Of Her Children," Keats's "Ode On A Grecian Urn," Whitman's "Song of Myself," Eliot's "The Hollow Men" and Plath's "Daddy," for example - the book represents a range of canonical and less familiar texts - Henry Kelsey's fur trade journal "Prologue", Sarojini Naidu's "Bangle-Sellers," Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I A Woman," Iroquois Confederacy's "Condolence" and "At the Wood's Edge" ceremonies, Frederick Philip Grove's "Arctic Woods," Afro-American spirituals and blues lyrics, rock and folk lyrics, and an international selection of emerging poets' works.

The editors have tried to select poems worth reading, arguing over and remembering - regardless of their positions in or out of the canon or their indebtedness to local or foreign traditions.