As a poet, critic, anthologist and teacher, Saskatchewan native Eli Mandel was a major figure in Canadian literature, particularly prairie literature. Mandel fashioned his identity as a post-Holocaust Jewish writer positioned dramatically between extremes of tradition and innovation, nation and region, East and West, producing work which can be read in a variety of contexts and which reflects patterns and changes within Canadian writing from the 1950s to the 1980s. This two-volume edition of Mandel's collected poetry includes the complete texts of ten previously published volumes of poetry, as well as 82 "new" poems never before presented in a collection.
