The Governor General's Poetry Winners

Winner of the Governor General's Award, this collection of Donnell's best poetry pulses with the realities of home, street, and working life. His ironic wit and lyrical passages make for a fantastic read complete with his signature deadpan style and post-modern sophistication. "Making it in the City," "Lakes," and "The True Story of Pat Garrett" are but a few of the titles included in this eclectic compilation.

By the highly acclaimed author of the novel Enemy Women Winner of the Governor General''s Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Now back in print, Paulette Jiles''s celebrated, multi-award-winning poetry collection. These are poems of scorching intensity, which examine the politics of childhood and love; explore the rigours and blessings of living in the far north; mark the way stations of a life of discovery and exploration. The result is a poetry of singular, telling immediacy.

From a 'sky clearing moon' to Pachinko neon to the Hume Hotel Ballroom, Fred Wah searches for his father within various forms and embraces. This is a beautiful book and we are in the muscle and limbs of rough cut clear language - live bright fish slapping the table. The Elite series is stunning and rare. --Michael Ondaatje.

Book by MacEwen, Gwendolyn

The poetry in the Governor General's Award-winning collection Furious is charged with Erin Moure's characteristic energy and wit as she explores the limits of pure reason and the language of power. There is, too, a fresh and often celebratory look at love, and, in an unusual finale, "The Acts," Moure challenges us to explore a feminist aesthetic: of thinking, of the page, of working life and the possibility of poetry.

Winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry Winner of the Pat Lowther Award The poems are informed by the author's long sojourns in both Canada and Europe, and a new horizon appears: the author gets acquainted with a group of refugees from the Near East and in some of the poems describes their predicament and her own identification with these homeless people, who begin to define a new country of the mind. Winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry and the Pat Lowther Award.

"Avison's new volume is a lyrical tribute to a created order suffused with a holy energy--a vitality inaccessible to the statisticians, the engineers, the corporate mandarins. It is not, however, a whimsical, Pollyanish ecstacy that sustains her, but a gritty religious vision grounded in our desperate humanity, the 'roped-in, rotten,/ welted and swollen, sick,/ tempter-take-all/ maggot- ripe end of our fall' ('He himself suffered when he was tempted'), but redeemed, generously redeemed." (Michael Higgins)

The poems in this haunting new book are both playful and provocative, witty and intimate. Central to the collection is a powerful elegy for her father. Beginning with his death, it moves back in time to the author's childhood in a small Saskatchewan community. Inventing the Hawk reveals the small pleasures of day-to-day life, sometimes visited by “Angels” who offer a novel, often shocking perspective on reality. As well, Crozier translates love and the experience of loss into a language resonant with desire and longing. A language that speaks to the most private aspects of ourselves. This is poetry that will change the way we look at our lives.

*1995 Governor General's Award for PoetryVoice, winner of the 1995 Governor General's Award for Poetry, is a unique book combining new paintings by Marie Elyse St. George with prose and poetry by Anne Szumigalski. The paintings will be featured in an exhibition at the Mendel Art Gallery, co-publisher of this book, in November 1995. Anne Szumigalski's words, which were initially inspired by the paintings, combine with the visual images of Marie Elyse St. George in a breathtaking display of beauty and inspiration.The collaboration between the two artists produces a volume of art which also acts as a tribute to art and its many forms. With precise detail and sensitivity, Szumigalski and St. George explore the complexities of life and of a world where myth and reality, spirit and matter, emotion and intellect come together in a mysterious dance. Voice digs deeply and honestly into the natural world and into the human psyche, revealing intriguing layers of information to arrive at an essential and intimate truth.

Book by Blodgett, E. D.

Land to Light On opens onto the landscape of Canada. “Out here I am…not even safe as the sea,” she writes. “If I am peaceful…is not peace,/is getting used to harm.” Brand writes about a place where she is an outsider – as any poet or painter must be – and also about the many outsiders who have come here and settled over the years, uncomfortable with the land and its people, uncomfortable sometimes with themselves. No one writes about this country like Brand, free of post-colonial cant yet selvedged with Black suffering in the Americas. Speaking of memory but without a longing for the past, these poems hover between story and song; between groundings of life, wherever your landfall, and the grace of love and light. They ring with a poet’s hesitations, a woman’s praise and prayer for her people and their place. “It always takes long to come to what you have to say, you have to/sweep this stretch of land up around your feet and point to the/signs, pleat whole histories with pins in your mouth and guess/at the fall of words.”

"These evocative poems move from the icon of Alice in Wonderland to the imagined figure of Alice out of Wonderland on a West Coast beach, underground with Persephone, in Memphis with Elvis. They also explore the life of the real Alice Liddell (1852-1934) who sat for Charles Dodgson's camera and inspired the Alice books which prompted his rise to fame as Lewis Carroll."--BOOK JACKET.

WINNER OF THE 1999 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR POETRY Songs for Relinquishing the Earth contains many poems of praise and grief for the imperilled earth drawing frequently on Jan Zwicky's experience as a musician and philosopher and on the landscapes of the prairies and rural Ontario. Songs for Relinquishing the Earth was first published by the author in 1996 as a hand-made book, each copy individually sewn for its reader in response to a request. It appeared between plain covers on recycled stock, with a small photo (of lavender fields) pasted into each copy. The only publicity was word of mouth. Part of Jan Zwicky's reason for having the author be the maker and distributor of the book was a desire to connect the acts of publication and publicity with the initial act of composition, to have a book whose public gestures were in keeping with the intimacy of the art. She also believed the potential audience was small enough that she could easily sew enough copies to fill requests as they came in. While succeeding in recalling poetry's public life to its roots, she was wrong about the size of that audience and her ability to keep up with demand as word spread, Hence, this facsimile edition. In publishing it, Brick Books has attempted to remain as faithful as possible to the spirit of those original gestures, while making it possible for more readers to have access to this remarkable book.

Book by McKay, Don

After nine years and nine trade printings, Gaspereau Press is issuing a revised and redesigned second edition of its most popular title. Originally released in 2000 in a limited edition of 66 books handset and printed letterpress in a folio format, Execution Poems has gone on to sell over 6000 copies. It was the winner of the 2001 Governor General's award for poetry and took first place in the poetry category of the 2001 Alcuin Awards for Excellence in Canadian Book Design. Execution Poems is a suite of poems about Clarke's cousins, George and Rufus Hamilton, who were hanged in July 1949 for the murder of a Fredericton, New Brunswick, taxi driver. In this startling work, Clarke reminds us of racism and poverty and of their brutal, tragic results, blurring the line between the perpetrator and the victim-a line we'd prefer to be simple and clear. As all true poetry should, Clarke's embodies both damnation and redemption, offering convoluted triumphs alongside tragedy.

Surrender opens into a new space where ideas, borders, and authority are questioned, explored, and exploded. The poems in this book, written over a period of years in a variety of geographical sites, from Vancouver, B.C., to Sydney, Australia, interact in apposition and opposition, often in parts that face each other across pages, in dialogue, counterbalance, or antiphony.

By the winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Best Book of the Year To his virtuoso collection of new poems, Tim Lilburn brings a philosopher’s mind and the eyes and ears of a marsh hawk. This series of earthy meditations makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Lilburn’s close study of goldenrod, an ice sheet, or night opens into surprising interior and subterranean worlds. Pythagoras lurks within the poplars, Socrates in stones, people fly below the ground. Elsewhere, the human presence of motels and beer parlours is ominous. Kill-site is an exploration of a human’s animal nature. Lilburn invites the reader to: “Go below the small things… then / walk inside them and you have their kindness.” Though a natural progression from Lilburn’s last book, To the River, in Kill-site, the poet moves toward a greater understanding of the human, of sacrifice.

Book by Roo Borson

"Processional is Anne Compton's second book of poems, the follow-up to her widely acclaimed debut, Opening the Island. Here, Compton is at the head of a poetic procession, leading readers through a house affected by daily life and the extraordinary, stopping only to take in the change of seasons. With one breath, she tells of life and death, with the next, joy and heartbreak."--Jacket.

Winner - Governor General's Award (2006) The poems in Stumbling in the Bloom engage the ever-present enticements and entanglements of beauty on life's, and art's, home ground - in wilderness and garden. But this surprising volume, the finale of John Pass's quartet of poetry books, At Large, takes intriguing side trips on the home-stretch, including a wry excursion to the chiropractor, a fanciful flight from a student driver's parallel parking practice, up an "Everest" in Alberta, and on a singularly moving Canadian journey towards and away from the "ground zero" of the 9/11 tragedy. The book, and Pass's aesthetic, come to rest finally on a fulcrum, a paradox, of acceptance: the embrace of uncertainty and unhappy accident that purpose and effort alone make possible.

"In a work of remarkable depth, equally attentive to inner and outer realities, Don Domanski's meditative alertness seamlessly renders the world luminous and flooded with possibilities. Intensely moving, these fluid poems open up our perceptions of what it means to be alive in a sentient universe. Domanski's cosmology grounds us with illuminating metaphors, and insights that make writing a sacred act once more. Book jacket."--Jacket.

The death of a young man’s mother instigates this collection of remarkable poems that seeks to map the limitations and breaking points of the human heart. The question of how and why humans fall in and out of love becomes a haunting refrain as the intricacies of relationships are probed. As his inherited belief systems continue to fail, the narrator also attempts to formulate a new, complex sense of self. Full of humor, sardonic wit, and conversational charm, this collection enchants as it strives to find the ultimate answers to love and life.

Selected for Poetry in Transit 2009 The Fly in Autumn is a nuanced work with an absurdist twist in which recognizable landscapes--of North Vancouver quays and piers and harbour fog--are sometimes irrevocably altered by "water-light" into places of the mind alive with "the hundred thousand thoughts everyone collects in a day." Risking unease, using language both tender and ironic, Zieroth's poems range from the cockiness of flight, from Dick and Jane readers to insurance clerks and blind nurses, and to the inevitability of decline. Still, the poet remains alert to the re-emergence of "his boyhood hope: to be brave, to ship out, to learn to sleep on waves."

Boxing the Compass is a poetry collection of mid-life reassessments that also makes room for the martyrdom of Saint Polycarp, tone-deaf church choirs, the last of the Newfoundland whalers, and vividly remembered Portuguese fishermen. Spiritually searching and intellectually rich, Richard Greene's third book --which ranges from intimate to ironic to satiric --shuns easy answers in poems of unfashionable eloquence comprised of colloquial textures, clear-eyed narratives, political subtexts, and no-nonsense introspection.

WINNER OF THE 75th GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR POETRY WINNER OF THE 25th TRILLIUM BOOK PRIZE WINNER OF AN ALCUIN AWARD FOR DESIGN SHORTLISTED FOR THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE These are poems of critical thought that have been influenced by old fiddle tunes. These are essays that are not out to persuade so much as ruminate, invite, accrue. Hall is a surruralist (rural & surreal), and a terroir-ist (township-specific regionalist). He offers memories of, and homages to -- Margaret Laurence, Bronwen Wallace, Libby Scheier, and Daniel Jones, among others. He writes of the embarrassing process of becoming a poet, and of his push-pull relationship with the whole concept of home. His notorious 2004 chapbook essay The Bad Sequence is also included here, for a wider readership, at last. It has been revised. (It's teeth have been sharpened.) In this book, the line is the unit of composition; the reading is wide; the perspective personal: each take a give, and logic a drawback. Language is not a smart-aleck; it's a sacred tinkerer. Readers are invited to watch awe become a we. In Fred Wah's phrase, what is offered here is "the music at the heart of thinking."

Poetry. "I have long considered Julie Bruck to be one of our most committed and humane voices. Bruck sees everything we do; she just seems to see it wiser. Her poems sing and roil with everything complicated and joyous we human monkeys are."--Cornelius Eady "MONKEY RANCH has all the antic sensuality and thrilling precision we've come to expect from Julie Bruck's work. This volume has a pitch-perfect elegance that calms the ruckus just long enough for us to glimpse the vulnerability of everyone involved. MONKEY RANCH is like the best sort of letter from a friend--full of gossip, lively observation, and serious wit."--Sharon Thesen