Civil and Civic

By Jonathan Bennett

“As accomplished as Jonathan Bennett is at using language, he’s never fussy or precious about it. With his exacting, contemporary voice, part colourful reporter, part reluctant witness, his lines gain their effect by serving experience in the most necessary way possible, via clear-eyed attention and vivid diction. The result is an immediacy often lacking in other poetry. Civil and Civic’s nimble narratives will crackle in your ear.”
– David O’Meara, author of Noble Gas, Penny Black

The poems of Jonathan Bennett’s second collection, Civil and Civic, probe for present meanings of civility and civic mindedness, search for boundaries between private and public realms, and question the sprawling and often unintended effects of transparency and obligation. Medicine, the military, science, public relations, social justice, media, business, and the environmental movement are just some of the worlds these poems inhabit.

Not without a spirit of play, in Civil and Civic Bennett emerges as a disquieting curator, giving the reader poetry that is relevant, humane, political, investigative, and outward looking. Yet, within which, he supplies voice to private moments, isolated or suppressed incidents, and to the happy accidents that can occur within language when irreconcilable spheres of influence meet and open up new meanings, ideas, hope even.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781554909872

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Copyright © Johnathan Bennett, 2011

Published by ECW Press

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Bennett, Jonathan, 1970–

Civil and civic / Jonathan Bennett.

Poems.

ISBN 978-1-55490-987-2

Also Issued As:

978-1-5549-940-7 (PDF); 978-1-77041-017-6 (PBK)

I. Title.

PS8553.E534C58 2011 C811'.6 C2010-906836-X

Editor for the press: Michael Holmes / a misFit book

Cover design: David Gee

Text design: Tania Craan

Typesetting: Troy Cunningham

Author photo: Christina Robertson Photography

The publication of Civil and Civic has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Government of Ontario through Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada