Annal:2006 Griffin Poetry Prize – Canadian
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Griffin Poetry Prize in the year 2006. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- <–2005
- Griffin Poetry Prize
- –end–
- 2006 Griffin Canadian winner
- Score: 10.56
Nerve Squall is a field guide like no other, a surreal handbook to a landscape at the crossroads of meteorology and neurology, where the electrical storms without and the electrical impulses within converge.
Legris’s fascination with weather, ghosts and brain disorders is the starting point for a collection of poetry that ensures you’ll never look at nature the same way again. You’ll find snow golems and ghost cats, and a sky filled with fish swimming the winds of a storm. And you’ll find a haunted terrain where the natural world becomes an allegory for our most intimate fears.
Despite their dark and often cinematic approach, these poems are also tinged with a sly, apocalyptic wit that can’t help but laugh as the sky falls.
Nerve Squall is a vital exploration of the symbiosis of storm, nerve and language, a sure-handed guide to the end of the world.
- 2006 Griffin Canadian shortlist
- Score: 6.56
The title of An Oak Hunch comes from one of the sequences in this five-sequence book of poems: Phil Hall’s homage to a poetic mentor, Al Purdy. Its subtitle is “Essay on Purdy,” and these highly original, highly personal takes on the poetry and the life of Al Purdy “essay” in the root sense of the word: attempt or probe. The other four sequences, “The Interview,” “Mucked Rushes,” “Gang Pluck” and “Index of First Lines” are also probes, each of a different sort, written in a language that stretches the denotative values of words. Phil Hall is as leftist as he ever was, but his recent books like Trouble Sleeping have also been adventures in language. His writing shines with a new economy reminiscent of that of some of the so-called “language poets.” Sometimes the poems of An Oak Hunch carry a narrative, sometimes they are leaping and lyrical, but they are all composed of word-music that connects the ear and the heart.
Saying the old, chipped words, I liked to think I was helping them pray too
words don’t know how to read, books…
- 2006 Griffin Canadian shortlist
- Score: 6.56
Erín Moure is one of the most consistently innovative, radically imaginative poets at work in Canada. With each book, Moure seeks to re-create “writing” from the ground up.
Little Theatres appears at a pressing historical crossroads, when we most need our language to be made restive again. Like the agua/water running through the collection—at once lingual exchange, submersion, balm, and sustenance—Moure’s voices are as fluid, clear, animated, and shimmering with light and life as ever.
Galician and English intermingle in this collection like currents of the same river. How can we open the infinitely small spaces of Little Theatres in our own lives? Can they take the place of war? And who, exactly, writes them? Erín Moure? The unjustly ignored thinker Elisa Sampedrín? Or a speaker inside us finally willing to give Little Theatres its due attention? An intimate act of cultural and personal interflow, this new work from a major poet has the power to alter our perception of where, and on what scale, the action is taking place.
