David Wevill (born 1935, Japan) is a Canadian poet and translator.[1] He became a dual citizen (American and Canadian) in 1994. Wevill is a professor emeritus in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin.[1]
He returned to his native Canada before the outbreak of World War II. He read History and English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and became a noted member of an underground literary movement in London known as The Group.
Wevill first made a name for himself as a poet when he was included in A. Alvarez's anthology The New Poetry (Penguin, 1962), aimed at resisting the conservative milieu of mainstream British poetry. In 1963 Wevill was showcased in A Group Anthology (Oxford University Press). Wevill's published works include Penguin Modern Poets 4 (Penguin, 1963); Birth of a Shark (Macmillan, 1964); A Christ of the Ice-Floes (Macmillan, 1966); Penguin Modern European Poets: Ferenc Juhász (Penguin, 1970); Firebreak (Macmillan, 1971); Where the Arrow Falls (St. Martin's, 1974); Casual Ties[1] (Curbstone, 1983; Tavern Books, 2010); Other Names for the Heart (Exile Editions Ltd., 1985); Figure of 8: New Poems and Selected Translations (Exile Editions Ltd., 1987); Figure of 8 (Shearsman, 1988); Child Eating Snow (Exile Editions Ltd., 1994); Solo With Grazing Deer (Exile Editions Ltd., 2001); Departures (Shearsman, 2003); Asterisks (Exile Editions Ltd., 2007); and To Build My Shadow a Fire: The Poetry and Translations of David Wevill[2] edited by Michael McGriff (Truman State University Press, 2010). Wevill is also the former editor of Delos, a literary journal centered on poetry in translation and the poetics of translation.