Annal:2003 Griffin Poetry Prize – Canadian
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Griffin Poetry Prize in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2003 Griffin Canadian winner
- Score: 10.53
In Margaret Avison’s new poems, little pleasures are bound up with larger ones. Her slightest subjects—beloved Toronto parks with their population of oaks, firs, squirrels, dogs, kids, even ants, and the minutest sighs of her contemporary urban soundscape—all have their being within an immense composition that calls and hauls us to a largeness, a category-breaking “always unthinkable” beyond. “Words have their life too, won’t/ compact into a theorem,” Avison says, and this is certainly true of hers.
To myself everywhere:
Cry out, “Break!” Break…
- 2003 Griffin Canadian shortlist
- Score: 6.53
This is a poem about the city. About a man who has visions, hovering on the edge but hating it, restless and at war with the world but wanting the peace that passeth understanding. Everything he does is half-done, except his death. When he falls, his parched spirit crying “thirsty,” his family falls apart. This is a poem about Toronto, the city that’s never happened before, about waiting for a bus, standing on a corner, watching a stranger: the bank to one corner, the driving school on another, the milk store and the church. This is also about the poet, her own…
Planet Earth: Poems Selected and New
- 2003 Griffin Canadian shortlist
- Score: 6.53
The title of this book is taken from Page’s poem, “Planet Earth”, which was chosen by the United Nations in 2000 for their celebratory program Year of Dialogue among Civilizations. Now poet and essayist Eric Ormsby, with Page’s input, has selected the best of Page’s poems originally collected in the two volumes of The Hidden Room (Porcupine’s Quill, 1997). Page has also contributed to Planet Earth a small number of very recent poems. Ormsby has written a wonderful introduction to this new selection; he hastens to point out that deciding what to…
