Ian Burgham
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ian Burgham (born 1950 in Auckland, New Zealand) is a poet. He is the son of Lt. Cmdr. Allen Russell Burgham, DSC, MiD, CD. and Jean Wallace. He has lived in New Zealand and Scotland, but currently resides in Canada. He spent his formative years in Kingston, Ontario and graduated from Queen's Universityin 1972. While at Queen's he studied poetry and poetic process with Professor George Whalley, poet, writer and well-known Coleridge scholar. In 1973, Burgham moved to New Zealand where he taught at Wellington College (New Zealand). In 1975 he moved to Scotland to attend Edinburgh University, taking an M. Litt. degree in Blake studies. His thesis, written under the supervision of Professor Michael Phillips, focussed on William Blake's theory of imagination and the origins of Blake's poetry and theories.
Burgham, a member of Canada's The League of Canadian Poets, worked in Edinburgh with the publishing company Canongate Publishing as a book salesman and an editor. During his two years at Canongate, he assisted Stephanie Wolfe Murray and Charles Wyld in the development of their list of authors which included Iain Crichton Smith, Sorley MacLean, Andrew Greig, Lady Naomi Mitchison, Harry Horse, Robin Jenkins, Alasdair Gray and Alastair Reid.
In 1980 Burgham became Publishing Manager of Macdonald Publishers of Loanhead. He worked with the publisher and literary icon, Callum Macdonald and founder of Lines Review. With Macdonald, Ian Burgham published the work of Robert Garioch, Iain Crichton Smith, Nigel Tranter, Alexander McCall Smith and others, and re-released out-of-print novels from authors such as Eric Linklater and John Buchan.
In 1982 Burgham returned to Canada to pursue a career in general list, business and medical publishing. He co-founded the publishing company Grosvenor House Press and later became a partner in an international healthcare communications, medical education agency. Later after assisting Dr. Walter Rosser, OC in the formation of the Centre for Effective Practice within the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto Burgham began work as an adjunct assistant professor in the Centre for Studies in Primary Care at Queen's University. He resigned that position in 2012 to work with Dr Fred Tudiver in establishing the International Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, Canada.
For a short time he helped to promote the Griffin Prize for Poetry to international markets. Burgham also collaborated with artist Uno Hoffmann in 2011.[1] Up until 2012 Burgham volunteered as a director of the Rowers' Pub Reading Series, one of Ontario's foremost literary venues for readings by recognized writers and poets. The Reading Series has been in operation since 2008.
Burgham has published six poetry collections; A Confession of Birds, The Stone Skippers (Tightrope Books), The Grammar of Distance (Tightrope Books), The Unquiet (Quattro Books), and Midnight (Quattro Books and MacLean Dubois of Edinburgh), the Sophia Poems (LyricalMyrical Press, Toronto). His poems continue to appear in literary journals and anthologies. Journals in which his work has appeared include; the "Literary Review of Canada",[2] "Queen's Quarterly",[3] "Precipice",[4] dANDdelion, "Harpweaver", "Prairie Fire", "Jones Avenue", "Contemporary Verse2" (CV2), "The New Quarterly", "Ascent Aspirations", the Dalhousie Review, Northern Poetry Review, the Toronto Quarterly, ARC Magazine, Five Bells Review, (AUS), Gutter Magazine (UK) and others.
In 2012 he moved to Quattro Books of Toronto. His first collection under the Quattro Books imprint, FourPoints Editions The Unquiet was edited by A. F. Moritz and Allan Briesmaster and was published in November 2012. His second work under the imprint of Quattro Books, "Midnight" was published in 2015.
In the summer of 2012 he read with Scottish poet Douglas Dunn OBE, at the Edinburgh Festival and with Todd Swift. A. F. Moritz, and Catherine Graham at Canada House in London, England. In 2015 Burgham was part of a poetry tour of the UK comprising Canadian poets Catherine Graham, Jeanette Lynes, Stephen Heighton along with Mike Garry of the UK) with readings in Manchester, London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Edinburgh and Glasgow in 2015.
