Born in 1940 in Ottawa, Ontario, legendary poet and musician William
Hawkins is one of the most important artists to emerge from Canada's
capital. He published six books from 1964-1974, attended the 1963 UBC
Summer Poetry Seminar, organized poetry readings at Ottawa's infamous Le
Hibou Coffeehouse, wrote songs and performed in bands (The Children,
Heavenly Blue), and published widely in Canada's most important little
magazines of the 1960s before retreating into silence in the 1970s and
working as a cab driver until his retirement in 2012. The Collected Poems of William Hawkins
gathers Hawkins's complete output. His books are printed alongside
previously unpublished and uncollected poems including early magazine
publications, the long-lost book Sweet and Sour Nothings, poems from the
time of his extended silence, as well as all work produced since his
gradual re-appearance in the 1990s. This volume presents the generous,
defiant, idiosyncratic, and compelling work of William Hawkins in its
entirety, making possible the renewed attention that this significant
body of work deserves.