Patrick Anderson (poet)

Patrick John MacAllister Anderson (born 4 August 1915, Ashtead - died 17 March 1979, Halstead) was an English-born Canadian poet. He was educated in Oxford and Columbia. He taught in McGill University between 1940 and 1950.

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 endge of bandit-infested jungle'. In the late 1970s most Singaporeans and certainly the millions of tourists who visit the Republic of Singapore annually may find such a statement difficult to believe, yet the account is only a quarter of a century old. 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, for 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.

elected Books and Collections

* "A Tent for April" (1945) and
* "The White Centre" (1946)
* "The Colour as Naked" (1953)
* "Snake Wine: A Singapore Episode" (1955)
* "Search Me" (1957)
* "Over the Alps: Reflections on Travel and Travel Writing" (1969)
* "A Visiting Distance - Poems: New, Revised, And Selected" (1976)
* "Return to Canada" (1977).

External links

* [http://parish.ashtead.org/people/pjma.htm A biography and list of works]
* [http://www.ccca.ca/history/ozz/english/authors/anderson_patrick.html A biography in OneZeroZero]
* [http://parish.ashtead.org/people/pjma.htm A biography in ashtead.org]
* [http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0000202 Patrick Anderson's] entry in [http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=HomePage&Params=A1 The Canadian Encyclopedia]