Patrick Anderson (poet)



Patrick John MacAllister Anderson (4 August 1915, Ashtead – 17 March 1979, Halstead) was an English-born Canadian poet.

Life
He was educated at Oxford and Columbia. He taught at McGill University between 1940 and 1950.

In March 1942 Anderson and Montreal Group poet F.R. Scott founded Montreal literary magazine Preview ; A.M. Klein and P.K. Page also became part of the editorial group. "Preview's orientation was cosmopolitan; its members looked largely towards the English poets of the 1930s for inspiration." Preview merged with a rival Montreal magazine, First Statement, in 1945 to become Northern Review.

Here is the blurb taken from the reissued version of Snake Wine by Oxford in Asia Paperbacks.


 * Snake Wine, first published in 1955, is an account of Patrick Anderson's two years at the University of Singapore as lecturer in English between 1950 and 1952. The original blurb of the book states 'for a while he lived in a lonely house on the edge of bandit-infested jungle'.,.. The publishers feel justified in reissuing the book as it is one of the most interesting accounts in English of the pre-independence, and pre-industrialization period. Patrick Anderson had an unjaded eye, an unconventional mind, a taste for the exotic, a keen sense of the droll and a lively interest in the diversity of human manners and motives. His account includes the many different sides of Singapore, from rat-infested midnight streets to clashes with traditional colonial civil servants and their wives; it is a fascinating story of one man's involvement in a Singapore that has changed out of all recognition, and can be enjoyed both by tourists and local residents alike.