James Crerar Reaney, (September 1, 1926 – June 11, 2008) was a Canadian poet, playwright, librettist, and professor, "whose works transform small-town Ontario life into the realm of dream and symbol." Reaney won Canada's highest literary award, the Governor General's Award, three times and received the Governor General's Awards for Poetry or Drama for both his poetry and his drama.
Life
Reaney was born on a farm in Easthope near Stratford, Ontario Almost all of Reaney's poems, stories, and plays are articulations of where he grew up.
Poet and story writer
Reaney studied English at University College, University of Toronto, receiving his M.A. in 1949. The same year he also received the Governor General's Award, the first of three, at the age of 23, for his first book of poetry, Red Heart..
Reaney married fellow poet Colleen Thibaudeau on December 29, 1951 in St. Thomas.
During the 1940s and 1950s Reaney also wrote and published short stories. While not published in book form until years later, his stories were influential in establishing the style of writing later called Southern Ontario Gothic In 1962 he won the Governor General's Award for Poetry or Drama a third time, this time for both his newest book of poetry, Twelve Letters to a Small Town, and his first book of plays, The Killdeer and Other Plays.
From 1973 to 1975 Reaney wrote the trilogy The Donnellys, which the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia calls "one of the nation's most important dramas." The three plays debuted at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre, directed by Keith Turnbull.
In 2023, the Blyth Festival produced all three plays in Reaney's The Donnelly Trilogy in repertory.
As well, Reaney coauthored several operas with musician John Beckwith, including Night-Blooming Cereus (1960), The Shivaree (1982), and Crazy To Kill (1988).
In 2022, London Ontario's AlvegoRoot Theatre produced a new production of Reaney's 1981 play Gyroscope.
Reaney also enjoyed painting and drawing and his art works, from the 1940s to 1990s, were put on exhibit at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario in 2008. Critics have called him a colonial, a rationalist and internationalist, a rabid nationalist, a symbolist, and a poet with the myth of coherence who is yet able to say something in an age of the random.
Publications
Poetry
- The Red Heart. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1949. |
- Masks of Childhood. Toronto: New Press, 1972.
- Baldoon, with C.H. Gervais. Erin, ON: Porcupine's Quill, 1976.
- Plays of James Reaney. ECW P, 1985.
- Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Glass adapted for the stage. Erin, ON: Porcupine's Quill, 1994.