John Newlove documentary on BRAVO! this Thursday

Don't forget this Thursday, April 19th at 8pm eastern on Bravo!, the premiere of Robert McTavish's documentary on the late poet John Newlove.

Here's what the Globe said:

CRITIC'S CHOICE
Globe and Mail, Friday, April 13, 2007
Henrietta Walmark

What to make of it all? The life and poetry of John Newlove
Bravo!, 8 p.m.

It's a single black and white photograph accompanied by a few lines of poetry that best captures the existential despair that shaped poet John Newlove and his life's work. Newlove is sitting, head slumped, his back to the sky. Light fills the pane, catching on his shirt collar as if to lift his chin from the darkness, the inwardness that envelops him. Against this backdrop these lines are recited: "Black night window/ Rain running down the fogged glass/ A blanched leaf hanging outside on a dead twig/ The moon dead/ The wind dying in the trees/ In this valley/ In this recession." Robert McTavish provides a deeply textured portrait of the great Canadian poet of the sixties. Sometimes as sparse yet dense as Newlove's poetry, the film uses floating text, family photos, conversations with fellow poets, friends and family as well as late-life interviews with Newlove to capture the complex soul tormented by depression and alcoholism, yet still able to write with, as George Bowering says, a "confidence and sufficiency that is so beautiful."

The documentary will also be shown this fall at the ottawa international writers festival at the launch of A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove, edited by Robert McTavish with an afterword by Jeff Derksen, to be published in September by Chaudiere Books.