Northrop Frye was one of our most distinguished and respected authorities on English literature. Prior to his death in 1991, he was principal and chancellor of Victoria College, University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

LISA MOORE is the acclaimed author of the novels Caught, February, and Alligator; the story collections Open and Something for Everyone; and the young-adult novel Flannery. Her books have won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and CBC’s Canada Reads, been finalists for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Moore is also the co-librettist, along with Laura Kaminsky, of the opera February, based on her novel of the same name. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Any publication by Northrop Frye is an important literary event; this one is of the highest importance to Canadian literature. Here Frye has collected all the essays he believes to be of permanent value on Canadian writing and painting. His tremendous intelligence and erudition is thus focused on a much smaller field of vision than it normally is. Tethered in its own backyard, as it were, this formidable creature can be observed more closely than it can be when it roams the far reaches of the literary world. - Globe and Mail

Frye’s handiwork is equivalent to most everyone’s masterwork. Nor can I imagine a more perceptive book being written about the Canadian poetic imagination. Northrop Frye resembles nobody so much as a poet Midas — everything he touches turns into poetic metaphor. - Toronto Star

These reviews are still relevant, partly because Frye is such a good critic and partly because his reviews embraced such a wide range of poetry that, perhaps especially in retrospect, they provide a fascinating sense of process through which a literature develops . . . We can respond to the immediate perceptions of a subtle and literate critical mind. - Maclean’s

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Bush Garden is that it reveals Northrop Frye as a practical critic. He does not try to fit everything he reads into preconceived theories, and the range of his sympathies is admirably wide. And he succeeds in demonstrating the importance for Canadian writers of their Canadian forebears. - CBC Anthology