Table of Contents for
Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground: The Poetry of F.R. Scott, selected with an introduction by Laura Moss

Foreword | Neil Besner

Biographical Note

Introduction | Laura Moss

Overture

Laurentian Shield

Coelacanth

Orangerie

My Amoeba Is Unaware

Mural

Lakeshore

A Grain of Rice

Incident at May Pond

Miranda

Trans Canada

To Certain Friends

Social Notes I, 1932

Social Notes II, 1935

Lest We Forget

For R.A.S. 1925-1943

W.L.M.K.

The Canadian Social Register

The Canadian Authors Meet

Bonne Entente

Brébeuf and His Brethren

All the Spikes But the Last

Saturday Sundae

Martinigram

A Lass in Wonderland

Picture in "Life"

On Kanbawza Road

On the Death of Gandhi

For Bryan Priestman

Last Rites

Ushering in the Quiet Revolution

Audacity

Fort Smith

A New City: E3

On Saying Goodbye to My Room in Chancellor Day Hall

Villanelle for Our Time

Afterword: Reading "Canon" Scott's Canon | George Elliot Clarke

Acknowledgements

Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground contains thirty-five of F.R. Scott's poems from across the five decades of his career. Scott's artistic responses to a litany of social problems, as well as his emphasis on nature and landscapes, remain remarkably relevant. Scott weighed in on many issues important to Canadians today, using different terms, perhaps, but with no less urgency than we feel now: biopolitics, neoliberalism, environmental concerns, genetic modification, freedom of speech, civil rights, human rights, and immigration. Scott is best remembered for "The Canadian Authors Meet," "W.L.M.K," and "Laurentian Shield," but his poetic oeuvre includes significant occasional poems, elegies, found poems, and pointed satires. This selection of poems showcases the politics, the humour, and the beauty of this central modernist figure.

The introduction by Laura Moss and the afterword by George Elliott Clarke provide two distinct approaches to reading Scott's work: in the contexts of Canadian modernism and of contemporary literary history, respectively.

Born in 1899 in Quebec City, Francis Reginald (Frank) Scott was a public poet, an accomplished editor and mentor of a generation of writers, an influential professor of constitutional law, and a founding member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Emerging as one of the "Montreal Group" of modernist poets of the 1920s, Scott spent the next five decades writing poetry and working to transform both Canadian poetics and politics. With a penchant for satire, Scott's work is sometimes playful and witty and sometimes gravely concerned with the legacies of political ineptitude and the fragility of both humanity and the environment.