2014 Book Awards: Winners
The League of Canadian Poets is proud to present the 2014 Book Awards Winners, including the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Raymond Souster Award.
Learn more about the 2014 awards and celebrate the poetry of 2013:
Congratulations to the winners, shortlisters, longlisters and publishers!
2014 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 2014 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award: Keith Garebian, Carl Leggo and Pearl Pirie.
Winner
Murray Reiss – The Survival Rate of Butterflies in the Wild (Hagios Press)
From the jurors
A powerful, moving book with poems that are poignant, accurate, written in deep ancestral memory, and in figurative language that is sometimes delicate and always accomplished. By focusing on the story of his relationship with his father, Reiss suggests how personal experience is inextricably connected to various contexts that form and transform our lives. A reader’s emotional engagement and the poet’s craft is sustained throughout, and no matter how passionate, the poems never collapse into mere emotion. This book feels important and heartfelt. Watch your wallet because this book has the articulacy of a confidence man.
About Murray Reiss
Murray Reiss was born in Sarnia, ON, and lives on Salt Spring Island, BC, with his wife Karen, a ceramic sculptor. Since moving to Salt Spring Island in 1979 he’s been a special education teacher and child care worker, and coordinator of the Salt Spring Water Council. He currently works as a freelance editor and environmental writer. His poetry and prose have been published in literary magazines and anthologies
in Canada and the United States. His chapbook, Distance from the Locus, was published by Mothertongue Press in 2005. He also performs with singer‐songwriter Phil Vernon as the “folkenword” duo Midnight Bridge.
About The Survival Rate of Butterflies in the Wild
With clarity and compassion, Murray Reiss writes of a childhood haunted by the Holocaust in which his father’s entire family perished – and by his father’s subsequent silence. A “second-hand survivor,” his father’s “distance from the chimneys didn’t spare him; / his distance from those smokestacks was his disease.”
Unrelenting in his refusal to soften the legacy of death and pain in his family history, Reiss’s poems speak the truth with integrity and grace. Elliptical and allusive, veined with dark humour often surreal, proceeding by fits and starts, by feints and misdirections, these poems illumine some of history’s darkest shadows with a flickering but redemptive light.
This is a powerful and fearless book that maps the uncertain terrain of memory and loss. We are richer for the strength of mind that Reiss conveys through his journey.
2014 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 2014 Pat Lowther Memorial Award: Elizabeth Greene, Cornelia Hoogland and Betsy Struthers.
Winner
Alexandra Oliver – Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway (Biblioasis)
From the jurors
Alexandra Oliver’s Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway is fresh and original. Stylistically formal, Oliver creates sharply realized scenes set within aural experiences honed by years as a performance poet. In “Over a Faberge Owl,” line and metre are “live branches” of iambic rhythm, rhyme and theatrics. But the wild untamed energies that underscore civilization also underscore these branches studded with “claws calmly gripping” them. Similarly dark underlining of civilized scenes—delivered with the lightest touch—is what is most outstanding in this exceptional book.
About Alexandra Oliver
Alexandra Oliver was born in Vancouver, BC. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and a CBC Literary Award in Poetry. The author of one previous book, Where the English Housewife Shines (Tin Press London, UK 2007), Oliver co‐edits The Rotary Dial, a journal of formalist poetry based in
Toronto. She teaches in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program at the University of Southern Maine.
About Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway
They all had names like Jennifer or Lynne
or Katherine; they all had bone-blonde hair,
that wet, flat cut with bangs. They pulled your chair
from underneath you, shoved their small fists in
your face. Too soon, you knew it would begin,
those minkish teeth like shrapnel in the air,
the Bacchic taunts, the Herculean dare,
their soccer cleats against your porcine shin,
that laugh, which sounded like a hundred birds
escaping from a gunshot through the reeds—
and now you have to face it all again:
the joyful freckled faces lost for words
in supermarkets, as those red hands squeeze
your own. It’s been so long! They say. Amen.
Oliver’s poems, which she describes as “text-based home movies,” unveil a cinematic vision of suburbia at once comical and poignant: framed to renew our curiosity in the mundane and pressing rhyme and metre to their utmost, Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway is a five-star performance from Canada’s new formalist sensation.
2014 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 2014 Raymond Souster Award: Bruce Hunter, Laurence Hutchman and Sheila Martindale.
Anne Compton – Alongside (Fitzhenry & Whiteside)
From the jurors
Every so often, one comes across a poet and sees what makes poetry, poetry. With a sudden flash of recognition, the reader stands before the cosmic stage and confronts all that is there. Anne Compton in Alongside writes masterfully about the exhilarating freedom of childhood memories, love expressed in a personal cartography and in the imaginative revelation of the history of a house and its former inhabitants. She writes with subtle music, startling analogies, extraordinary metaphors, les mots justes — blended in an orchestral arrangement with keen intelligence, powerful emotion and exquisite craft — all waiting for the reader to discEvery so often, one comes across a poet and sees what makes poetry, poetry. With a sudden flash of recognition, the reader stands before the cosmic stage and confronts all that is there. Anne Compton in Alongside writes masterfully about the exhilarating freedom of childhood memories, love expressed in a personal cartography and in the imaginative revelation of the history of a house and its former inhabitants. She writes with subtle music, startling analogies, extraordinary metaphors, les mots justes — blended in an orchestral arrangement with keen intelligence, powerful emotion and exquisite craft — all waiting for the reader to discover.
About Anne Compton
Anne Compton is the two‐time winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize and winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry for her second collection Processional. In 2008, she was awarded the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English Language Literary Arts. A former teacher and writer‐in‐residence at the University of New Brunswick at Saint John, she developed and directed acclaimed Lorenzo Reading Series.
About Alongside
Anne Compton’s fourth collection, Alongside, tells an unexpected love story, a celebration of beauty which begins in the mind and wanders out into the garden and back again through the library. It is a story that moves between the wild and the domestic. Beauty, like the figure of the fox that appears and re-appears here, is joyous and elusive, glimpsed and gone. Every poem in the book is a conversation, with other writers, with lovers, with books, and an Island past. A conversation about the way in which the unlived life always walks beside us.