This book is an exhilarating revelation. No other poet in Canada has the depth and range of Dennis Lee. Jazzman, jester, and metaphysician, hardball political thinker and passionate lover, he has been publishing poems for fifty years, working across the spectrum from nursery rhymes and skipping songs to uncompromising moral introspection to full-tilt love songs, plangent psalms, and ecstatic, solitary prayer. This Omnibus represents them all, and it will make your head spin. There are poets' poets and people's poets. And then there are those few who are neither and both: the few who become, over time, part of the warp and weft of their culture. The Dennis Lee Omnibus collects for the first time work from all corners of this extraordinary career, from Lee's searing early breakthroughs to his beloved children's verse to his visions of environmental apocalypse. A must-have collection from one of Canada's literary icons.

On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the third of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Riffs features a new introduction by the poet Paul Vermeersch, a reprint of an extended interview with Dennis Lee about the book, and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.
Riffs is a story of a passionate love affair, told in vintage Lee style—with whoops, deep chords, and headlong improvisational arcs. We hear Bach, Bo Diddley, Bird; the news is heartache and being. Celebratory, claustrophobic, the poem tracks ways in which eros and our lives are made mutually accountable.
Tell me what you cherish, won’t
just walk; give me lifetime,
not renege. I have no other use. Living I flubbed.
But mouth to mouth I could sometimes ache into words.
—from Riffs (#85)

This beautiful new edition of Civil Elegies attests to Dennis Lee's uncompromising exploration of citizenship, both Canadian and human.