2017 Book Awards: Winners
The League of Canadian Poets is proud to present the 2017 Book Awards winners of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Raymond Souster Award.
The winners will each receive $2000 thanks to funding from Canada Council for the Arts , Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council.
2017 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.
This Being by Ingrid Ruthig (Fitzhenry & Whiteside)
Ingrid Ruthig, writer, poet, visual artist, and once-practising architect, is the author of the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Memorial Award-winning book This Being (Fitzhenry & Whiteside), the poem-sequence artist’s bookwork Slipstream (Arkitexwerks), and the chapbook Synesthete II. She has also published (as editor and contributor) several critical volumes, including The Essential Elizabeth Brewster – poems (Porcupine’s Quill), David Helwig: Essays on His Works (Guernica Editions) and others. Her award-winning visual works, held in various collections, have been exhibited at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Whitby’s Station Gallery, and other public spaces. A 2018 Fellow at the Hawthornden International Writers Retreat and the recipient of a 2005 Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize, she lives east of Toronto, along the north shore of Lake Ontario.
From the jurors:
“Formally elegant, Ruthig’s poetry is smooth and reflects an impeccable ear. Ruthig picks up an idea and unspools it to its end with precision and calmness. This is a book that took its time to be made and for its performance, being consistently excellent from front to back. Her poems read as sonic and ‘sombre supplicant to the whims/ of living, age, genetics, and weather’ fashioned into a ‘stronghold of I.’”
About This Being:
In this, her debut collection, Ingrid Ruthig records the ebb and flow of individual life through time, landscape, and our collective existence. How we connect with the past, where we are now, and despite our inherent separateness, our personal convergences — these are what lay ahead on this journey. Ruthig also explores our need to create, to build a deeper sense of self, of belonging: questioning, observing, then striving to respond. Her voice is confident, concentrated, wry. This is a book of poems about the dynamic of being, and our shifting perception of who we are from one moment to the next.
2017 PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD WINNER
Open to Canadian women, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award has been awarded annually since 1981 for a book of poetry published in the preceding year. This prize is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $2000 prize, and is sponsored by the LCP.
Heaven’s Thieves by Sue Sinclair (Brick Books)
Sue Sinclair (she/her) grew up in Newfoundland on the ancestral homelands of the Beothuk, and she is the author of six collections of poetry, including her latest book, Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems (Goose Lane Editions, 2022). Sue’s previous title, Heaven’s Thieves (Brick Books, 2016), won the 2017 Pat Lowther Award for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman; her other books have also won or been nominated for a variety of awards. Sue has a PhD in philosophy and wrote her dissertation on beauty and ethics. She currently edits for Brick Books and teaches creative writing at the University of New Brunswick on Wolastoqiyik territory, land of the “beautiful and bountiful river.”
From the jurors:
“The beautiful Heaven’s Thieves, by Sue Sinclair, is a constant conversation with the earth, with our human companions and present-day world, and with our civilization’s best elements, insightfully chosen by the poet: wisdom, heroism, loving emotion, the struggle with regret and all forms of pain, the struggle with death. Above all, it is a constant conversation with any of us who will read it. It stimulates and provokes us constantly, it asks us what it is that we feel and think, and it listens seriously. Sinclair’s noted power for expressive, penetrating phrases, images and comparisons here finds new levels of intensity and intimacy. And the conversation that Heaven’s Thieves conducts is not with us alone: it brings to the table a wide variety of figures from many cultural and historical sites, and puts us in refreshed contact with our world and our past. On every page is a poem of formal accomplishment. On every page, too, is a host of thoughts—sharply focused and unified yet free and encouraging freedom—jthat send the reader back to life with new vistas and new love.”
About Heaven’s Thieves:
Heaven’s Thieves is a collection engaged with the big questions — What are bodies for? What does it mean to be alive? What is beauty and why does it have such power over us? What is the point of art?—and the urgent ones—how to live in a shattered ecology, what to do about grief, illness, betrayal. Sinclair turns her attention to these questions with fearless curiosity, economy, and an originality born of her willingness to pursue her own line of inquiry to its limit. These poems get close and cut deep, mixing subject and object, surface and soul: “Red mud glistens / like cut fruit—or like the knife / that did the cutting, laid down.”
In this, her fifth collection, Sinclair knows that nature is both “done to death” and “inexhaustible”; that art is an elegy for experience, but even so,
…to die
is not to wash through the body of a deer like a ghost;
it isn’t to skulk under a living skin.
It’s a change in the value of things.
(from “The Dead”)
Experience and its value are changed in these poems. They are as wise as they are disruptive, and they change us as surely as they remake the world.
2017 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.
Burning in This Midnight Dream by Louise Bernice Halfe (Coteau Books)
Louise Bernice Halfe is a poet and social worker whose Cree name is Sky Dancer. She is Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Halfe weaves Cree language and teachings into her work, a political act against silence and erasure. Born in Two Hills, Alberta, and raised on Saddle Lake Reserve, she has written five poetry collections. Blue Marrow, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, and the acclaimed Burning in this Midnight Dream, are her responses to the painful legacy of the residential school system—of which she is a survivor. Halfe’s newest collection honours her culture and invites laughter: in awâsis – kinky and disheveled, a gender-fluid trickster figure leaps from Cree stories into her lively, lyrical poems. Halfe, who began writing poetry when she was 16, received the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize in 2017 for her remarkable body of work, served as Saskatchewan’s poet laureate, and lives in Saskatoon.
From the jurors:
“Burning in this Midnight Dream honours the witness of a singular experience, Halfe’s experience, that many others of kin and clan experienced. Halfe descends into personal and cultural darkness with the care of a master story-teller and gives story voice to mourning. By giving voice to shame, confusion, injustice Halfe begins to reclaim a history. It is the start of a larger dialogue than what is contained in the pages.
Awoken from the sleeping forest I listened / to the distant arrival of sound.
“She moves through hurt, anger, and shame by shining light on the dark parts of what we do to each other. It allows us, as readers, intimate knowledge and hope for reconnection and love. The book moves out of simple poetry, and moves towards reconciliation through poetry. Burning in this Midnight Dream helps to heal and helps to restore respect because of its unwavering intimacy. The best of writing happens when voice inspires healing. This is exactly what Louise Bernice Halfe does with her award-winning collection.”
About Burning in this Midnight Dream:
Many of the poems in Louise Halfe’s Burning in This Midnight Dream were written in response to the grim tide of emotions, memories, dreams and nightmares that arose in her as the Truth and Reconciliation process unfolded. In heart-wrenching detail, Halfe recalls the damage done to her parents, her family, herself. With fearlessly wrought verse, Halfe describes how the experience of the residential schools continues to haunt those who survive, and how the effects pass like a virus from one generation to the next. She asks us to consider the damage done to children taken from their families, to families mourning their children; damage done to entire communities and to ancient cultures.
Halfe’s poetic voice soars in this incredibly moving collection as she digs deep to discover the root of her pain. Her images, created from the natural world, reveal the spiritual strength of her culture.