The Hogg Poems and Drawings

… I cannot easily find anything like it in Canadian literature except a few poems by Margaret Atwood on love and survival. I would have to turn for comparison, to poems like the English poet Ted Hughes’ sequence on Crow, the Irish poet Tom Kinsella’s Notes from the Land of the Dead or the American poet Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares. Now Canada has a poem to join them – a compost heap of suffering and acceptance for all sad children to play with.” —John Montague

“There’s a lot of truth in that metacarpace! What a cosmogony! Poems without second: —a true misanthrope; Ambrose Bierce didn’t die in Mexico, he’s alive and well living under an assumed name – Callaghan!” —Joe Rosenblatt

“Hogg, splendid poem … a song pious yet profane, an attempt to celebrate, through an incantation that resonates with the contemporary and the biblical, the force and fragility of our condition of life.” —Marie-Claire Blais

“Poets are messengers —and like Job’s servant they survive extraordinary visions to escape ‘alone’ to tell us what they’ve seen. Not all visions are unique but Barry Callaghan has broken from a dream that is both unique and marvelous. Thank God he got back alive to tell us! In the circle of ‘Hogg’s Poems’ Callaghan has locked our own chaotic present into the wheel of universal myth. The book will burn your fingers. The occasion of its publication is one of those all too rare events —the sounding of a new and authentic voice.” —Timothy Findley

“This is a most remarkable book. Hogg is a major breakthrough in modern Canadian Poetry.”—Yehuda Amichai

Barry Callaghan’s short stories, novels, poetry, and nonfiction have been published widely, and translated into many languages… a body of work spanning 50 years.