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
all our securities, and break out!
Explore only the ranges
beyond our mastering. Take on
the inexorable demands made by
a norm of unpremeditated excellence!
—from “Alternatives to Riots but all Citizens Must Play”
Concrete and Wild Carrot is Margaret Avison’s sixth book of poems. She is one of Canada’s most respected writers, still at the top of her form in a career that stretches back to the 1940s, and during which she has gained…
- 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 restless sensibility woven in and out through moments of lyric beauty, dramatic power and storytelling grace. It is written in the margins, like a medieval manuscript with shades of light and darkness.
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 include was a most difficult process because there was so much to choose from. He goes on to say:
“It has become customary in Canada to describe P. K. Page as ‘distinguished’, but that epithet betrays her. P.K. Page is simply too vivacious, too cunning, too elusive, to be monumentalized. She is in fact the supreme escape artist of our literature. Try to confine her in a villanelle and she scampers off into free verse. Peg her as a prose poet and she springs forth with a glosa. Categorize her as a poet who writes fiction…
