2013 Book Awards: Winners
The League of Canadian Poets is proud to present the 2013 Book Awards Winners, including the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Raymond Souster Award.
Learn more about the 2013 awards and celebrate the poetry of 2012:
Congratulations to the winners, shortlisters, longlisters and publishers!
2013 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD WINNER
Awarded annually since 1981, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award is given in the memory of Gerald Lampert, an arts administrator who organized author tours and took a particular interest in the work of new writers. The award recognizes a first book of poetry published by a Canadian writer in the preceding year. The award carries a $2000 prize and is sponsored by the LCP.
Thank you to the jurors for the 2013 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award: Kathy Mac, Marguerite Pigeon, Heather Cadsby.
Winner
Gillian Savigny – Notebook M (Insomniac Press)
From the jurors
Inspired by one of the notebooks compiled by Charles Darwin on his voyage around the world, Gillian Savigny’s Notebook M takes some provocative concepts of nineteenth century naturalism and runs with them. The book’s three sections play with poetic form, particularly “Journal of Researches: Patagonia,” in which Savigny exhumes poetry from Darwin’s texts. Savigny’s language compels the reader, seamlessly integrating scientific and pseudo-scientific terms — a significant achievement. Like Darwin, she covers uncharted ground, and her poetry exhibits the same charm that earmarks his prose. M is for many things, including magnificent.
About Gillian Savigny
Originally from Vancouver, Gillian Savigny has studied and worked in cities across Canada. She holds a B.A. honours degree in English Literature from Queen’s University and an M.A. degree in English Literature
and Creative Writing from Concordia University. She lives in Toronto, where she works in the nonprofit sector.
About Notebook M
Gillian Savigny”s Notebook M imagines what scientific creativity might accomplish if given the space to play, free of the burden of empirical proof and the need to control meaning. Inspired by Charles Darwin”s own Notebook M, in which he brought his scientific sensibility towards decidedly unscientific notions of metaphysics, morals, imagination, and expression, in this collection the poet dons a lab coat and brings together the techniques and procedures of poetry and science. The result is a remarkably accomplished first collection of poetry. Natural selection becomes a technique to pull poems from Darwin”s prose, in a series of found poems. Metaphor becomes an experiment — a way of testing hypotheses about the nature of being and seeing. Savigny manipulates the lyric mode to address issues pertinent to both poets and scientists: issues of authorship, originality, copyright, and value. Invested with wonder, mystery, wit, and pathos, these poems strain against their own procedures and logic, affirming the wild, expressive potential of words.
2013 PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD WINNER
The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a woman in Canada, and is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $2,000 prize. This award is inclusive of trans women and non-binary individuals who feel comfortable being recognized by a women’s prize.
Thank you to the jurors for the 2013 Pat Lowther Memorial Award: Kate Braid, Gay Allison, Marsha Barber.
Winner
Rachel Rose – Song and Spectacle (Harbour Publishing)
From the jurors
I fell in love with this book…it made me weep. Song & Spectacle is a mature & moving
exploration of what it truly means to be human. A compassionate & passionate mother’s touch:
an authentic and truthful plea for a better world. Rose’s poetry is lyrical with a narrative impulse,
combined with a startling honesty and wisdom that is both humbling and deeply felt. This is a
strong and inspirational book.
Using traditional form, rhythm and rhyme when she wants to, and with a sparkle and sweet
sense of humour that are uniquely her own, Rose is a storyteller. She lures you to come closer as
she talks about anything, everything – from rain to death to breastfeeding – and you come away
feeling somehow wiser, and lighter.
Spectacular. Took off the top of my head. Powerful imagery, rich language, a fierce appeal to
both the heart and the mind.
About Rachel Rose
Rachel Rose is a writer whose work has appeared in journals in Canada, the US, New Zealand and Japan. Her first book, Giving Body to Science (McGill/Queen’s University Press, 1999) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal, and won the Quebec Writers’ Federation A.M. Klein Award. Her second book, Notes of Arrival and Departure, was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2005. Winner of the Peterson Memorial Prize for poetry and the Bronwen Wallace Award for fiction, she holds a BA in English from McGill University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She lives in Vancouver, BC.
About Song and Spectacle
Song and Spectacle, the third collection by award-winning poet Rachel Rose, is composed of fierce hymns to the particular and universal struggles of birth, passion and loss, and the paradoxical quest for non-attachment in a treacherous, unpredictable and yet deeply beloved world.
Rose delves into the world of myth, using the stories of Daphne and Peneus, Shamhat and Enkidu and Grendel’s mother to create new allegories for our times. Her poems also explore the aftereffects of suicide on those left behind, the truths of lesbian motherhood and the exquisite splendour of the natural world. Thus, even as she celebrates the cherry trees that “. . . create a spectacle, tossing their wet confetti/ at the window. A child’s hair falls out/ on her pillow. Blood pools under the skin of the sky,” she holds always the synchronous reality of beauty and pain, death and birth, love and loss, at the heart of her poetry. This hard-won knowledge makes her world and her words unforgettable.
2013 RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD WINNER
The Raymond Souster Award was started in 2013 to honour Raymond Souster, an early founder of the League of Canadian Poets. The award is presented annually for a book of poetry by a League member published in the preceding year. The award carries a $2000 prize, and is sponsored by the LCP.
Thank you to the jurors for the 2013 Raymond Souster Award: David Day, Louise Bernice Halfe, Barry Dempster.
A.F. Moritz – The New Measures (House of Anansi Press Inc.)
From the jurors
Albert Moritz’s The New Measures is filled with both ruin and creation and their domination of our recurring dreams, our flow in and out of apocalypse, our faith in the Word in all its forms. There is such fierceness here, voices rung from both steel and stars; praises embedded in even the darkest of lamentations. Moritz’s tenderness sits side by side with his rage in these poems as if he still believes in paradise, as if poetry might be a way of achieving it.
About A.F. Moritz
A.F. Moritz has written sixteen books of poetry, and has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Ingram Merrill Fellowship. His collection The Sentinel won the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, and was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Books of the Year. He lives in Toronto.
About The New Measures
The follow up to The Sentinel, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, A. F. Moritz’s The New Measures is a bold collection of fiery, passionate, visionary, and fiercely singing new work. These poems make unique music, by turns tender and forceful, terrified and assured, grateful and enraged. They revel in pleasure, and the thirst for more pleasure. And they insist on the hope — perhaps paradoxical, perhaps impossible, yet never extinguished — for the perfection of a world both natural and human. The New Measures makes fear and grief into prophecy and joy at each turn of phrase. It is a brilliant new work from one of our greatest poets.