Reaney, James (1926–2008)

Canadian poet and playwright. His deceptively simple poetry and experimental plays draw upon the child's world of metaphor. Works of poetry include The Red Heart (1949), A Suit of Nettles (1958), and The Killdeer and other Plays and Twelve Letters to a Small Town, both 1962. His play The Donnellys: a Trilogy, published 1983, is a historical sequence based on the massacre of an Irish family in Ontario in 1880.

For children, he wrote the novel The Boy with an R in his Hand (1965) and the play Names and Nicknames (1969).

He taught at the University of Manitoba 1949–60, and later at the University of Western Ontario, where he became professor of English in 1960 and edited the periodical Alphabet 1960–71.