Some Frames

Jack Hannan has, until now, been one of Canadian poetry’s best-kept secrets. Some Frames brings together a body of new work with poems that appeared in small circulation chapbooks and magazines in the late 1970s and 1980s — poems that were admired at the time by an intimate circle of readers and critics, but which never reached a wider audience. Hannan’s poetry has most often been compared to Stephane Mallarmé’s and John Ashbery’s. Mysterious, fluid, sometimes hermetic, sometimes hypnotic, moving the way music moves, his poems are like abstract painting in words — except that they are warm with hints of figuration and narrative, of human drama stirring beneath the surfaces, textures and weathers, the shifting planes of light, the indoor and outdoor spaces they so tangibly evoke.rn