David Wevill was born a Canadian in Japan in 1935, and was educated in both Canada and England. He has lived in Burma and in Spain but has made his home in Austin, Texas for the past fifty years. While resident in England in the 1950s and '60s, he established a substantial reputation as a poet, publishing four volumes between 1964 and 1973. He won prizes, was represented in major anthologies such as
The New Poetry and
A Group Anthology, and was included in the renowned
Penguin Modern Poets series before his first full collection appeared. All of his poetry has now been gathered in two
Collected volumes, published simultaneously with this book. In the late '60s he moved across the Atlantic to take up a position in Austin, Texas, and then joined the University of Texas there in 1970, where he remained until retirement as Professor Emeritus in 2008. He still lives in Austin today. His work slowly fell from view in Britain after the publication of 1973's
Where the Arrow Falls, although a number of poetry collections appeared in his native Canada.
Casual Ties first appeared in Austin in 1983, and was republished in 2010 in Portland. Neither edition was easily obtainable in the UK or Canada, and this edition finally makes the collection of indefinable prose pieces available internationally. Prose poems, metafictions, short stories, meditations, alle-gories: all are here.
Sui generis,
Casual Ties fully deserves to stand alongside Wevill's poetry and should be known by a wider public.
