A remarkable achievement notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, wealth of literary history, incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and for the window it
opens onto the unfolding human and artistic drama of two great Canadian writers who have exchanged correspondences for decades. Joe Rosenblatt and Barry Callaghan, poets of perspicacity,
pizzazz, and probity, have been combative, ecstatic compadres for over 40 years, with Callaghan donning an array of chapeaus, the man of belles lettres and warthog flaneur-on-the-hoof from
Smooth City, while Rosenblatt decades ago declared his unconditional allegiance to the buzzzers, chirpers, and purrers of the natural world, to remain at peace by his pond, aloof from the
human horde. This most unlikely pair are conjoined by their shared dedication to the Word, to those rare moments of ascendent insight that are contained in bedrock language, to disputation
about all matters of gravity and gullibility, and to the sharing of extraordinary paintings and ink drawings come from their nether surreal and noumenal worlds. Hoggwash, a convergence
by epistle, is a tribute not just to their enduring friendship but to the life of the imagination itself. There is no record of correspondence like this, anywhere in the world.
