Anne Wilkinson (poet)

Anne Cochran Wilkinson (née Gibbons) (September 21, 1910 – May 10, 1961) was a Canadian poet who was part of the modernist movement in Canadian poetry in the 1940s and 1950s, one of only a few prominent women poets of the time, along with Dorothy Livesay and P. K. Page. Wilkinson published two books of poetry, Counterpoint to Sleep (1951) and The Hangman Ties the Holly (1955). A founding editor and patron of the literary quarterly The Tamarack Review, she also wrote a family history, Lions in the Way (1956), about her maternal family, the Oslers, and a modern fairy tale for children, Swann and Daphne (1960), before her early death from cancer in 1961. Her work was anthologized in The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, appeared in several prominent Canadian literary journals of the day, including Northern Review and The Tamarack Review, was broadcast on CBC Radio's Anthology and recorded on the album Six Toronto Poets, alongside the works of W.W.E. Ross, Raymond Souster, Margaret Avison, James Reaney and Jay Macpherson. Forgotten for several decades, her work has enjoyed a minor revival since the publication in 2003 of Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1924–1961, edited by Dean Irvine.