Poetic Obituaries: At U of T, he [James Reaney] was strongly influenced

by Northrop Frye and Fearful Symmetry, his book on the poetry of William Blake, which was published in 1947. Even as an undergraduate, he was already writing poetry and short stories. The first brought him acclaim, the second notoriety. He was only 23 when he won the Governor-General's Award in 1949 for his first collection of poems, The Red Heart. A collage in which a young man tries to reconcile his childhood memories with the harsh and often incomprehensible world of experience, the volume contains 42 poems, written during his university days, including The School Globe, in which the poet pictures himself holding the "wrecked blue cardboard pumpkin" with its lines of latitude and longitude, and laments the loss of the "fair fields and lands" of his childhood. Here is how it ends: "If I raise my hand/No tall teacher will demand/What I want./But if someone in authority/Were here, I'd say/Give me this old world back/Whose husk I clasp/And I'll give you in exchange/The great sad real one/That's filled/Not with a child's remembered and pleasant skies/But with blood, pus, death, stepmothers, and lies./"

from The Globe and Mail: Author was 'one of the finest writers Canada has produced'

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