Description:
Diligently researched biography of one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century.
Brief description: Ralph Maud (1928-2014), a world-renowned expert on the work of Dylan Thomas, Charles Olson, and the ethnographers of the Pacific Northwest, was professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University and founder of the Charles Olson Literary Society. He was the author of Charles Olson Reading (1996), the editor of The Selected Letters of Charles Olson (2000), Poet to Publisher: Charles Olson's Correspondence with Donald Allen (2003), Charles Olson at the Harbor (2008), and Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews (2010), and the co-editor of After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff (2014). He edited much of Dylan Thomas's work, including The Notebook Poems 1930-1934 and The Broadcasts, and was co-editor, with Walford Davies, of Dylan Thomas: The Collected Poems, 1934-1953 and Under Milk Wood. Maud was also the editor of The Salish People: Volumes I, II, III & IV by pioneer ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout. He was a contributing editor to Coast Salish Essays by Wayne Suttles and The Chilliwacks and Their Neighbours by Oliver Wells, and authored A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend and The Porcupine Hunter and Other Stories -- a collection of Henry W. Tate's stories in Tate's original English, which grew out of his survey of Franz Boas's Tsimshian work, published as an article: "The Henry Tate-Franz Boas Collaboration on Tsimshian Mythology" in American Ethnologist. Maud's subsequently published book, Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology, expands further on the relationship between Henry Tate and Franz Boas.
Review Quotes:
"Olson asked him to 'be his scholar' (basically, an invited observer) at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference. It was Maud's destiny to become Olson's scholar in truth."
-- Pacific Rim Review of Books