Selected Poetry & Prose

The writing of Robert W Service is mostly known through his poems and ballads. Immortalised by his two iconic ballads, The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Shooting of Dan McGrew , he has entered the world’s imagination as the Bard of the Yukon. But Service was much more than a chronicler of the Great North. A traveller and adventurer who tried his hand at many occupations - bank clerk, orange picker, journalist, stretcher bearer, etcetera - upon which he drew both for his ballads and in his fiction, Service left a fascinating set of impressions of that rare accomplishment: the successful literary life in the course of which he produced everything from poems and ballads to fictional romance to thrillers and how to stave off the dreary process of ageing. This is a fresh selection of the most interesting and significant works of the author with a biographical introduction, notes on the various selections, and a bibliography of additional readings.