Style and Substance

What's the verse that could happen?: B.C. poet Elizabeth Bachinsky, nominated for a Governor General's Literary Prize for Poetry. (Dave Aharonian/Nightwood Editions)

Approximately 170 English-language poetry collections are released annually in Canada, not counting self-published volumes and chapbooks. Most of them don’t get reviewed in newspapers or grab shelf space in bookstores, which is why the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, one of two major prizes for poetry in this country (the other is the Griffin Poetry Prize, awarded in the spring), is so important. Apart from the cash (the winner gets $15,000, the runners-up a consolation prize of $1,000 each), the prize generates a bit of media fanfare for a genre that seldom garners much bling or buzz.

So, what does it take to be noticed? Judging by this year’s GG shortlist, announced Oct. 16, the loosely conversational, anecdotal mode prevalent in a lot of Canadian poetry doesn’t cut it. Virtuosity is a virtue: the five finalists are phrase makers of ample skill that remind us that words are sound, not just shapes on a page. Otherwise, there’s a geographic concentration of power (a trio of West Coast writers and two Torontonians) and a confirmation that House of Anansi Press (which has two books on the shortlist) is arguably the most influential poetry publisher in the country.

Courtesy Nightwood Editions.

Historically, GG juries have tended to honour experience while giving a nod or two to youthful promise. The up-and-comer on this year’s list is Elizabeth Bachinsky, of Vancouver, whose Home of Sudden Service is just her second collection. Bachinsky draws on her experience growing up in the hinterland (she’s spent time in northern B.C., the Yukon and B.C.’s Fraser Valley), which she characterizes as “a northern place where it’s cold / as hell and the girls are straight as lodgepole pines.” It’s geography as destiny: hormone-driven, slightly delinquent teens spend their time drinking bootleg beer and making out in cars; small-town girls marry early and settle into drudgery; guys drive pickup trucks and work at dead-end jobs. As Bachinsky puts it, “this is what we saw from our windows: / a parking lot, a dollar store, rain.”

She gives the grungy, trailer-park feel of this material an intriguing tilt by setting it within the strictness of traditional forms like the sonnet. Think of Shakespeare’s lofty examples (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / admit impediments…”) and then tune into Bachinsky’s gritty, vernacular variations, including one about breaking into a car:

A teacup, a spark plug, some hard knick-knack
anything made of porcelain will do
the trick and knock a window out, smooth
as snow settles on a lawn. One good crack
and shush the glass is filigree and gold…

Bachinsky isn’t likely to win, but the GG nod ensures that her book will get some deserved attention.

Courtesy Oolichan Press.

As for the rest, they’re all strong contenders. John Pass, also a West Coast writer, has the longest bibliography among the finalists; Stumbling in the Bloom, the book nominated this year, is his 15th collection. He also probably has the best claim to experiencing “writer’s high,” if the heightened language of his work is any indication of his endorphin levels. At one point in this freewheeling, adrenalin rush of a book, Pass compares his task as a writer to that of the bee, “stumbling in the huge bloom… no method, but laden.” His rich variety of sources ranges from “the spin of my son’s bicycle wheel” to “the fanfare / thread of the dark in the throat of a blooming trumpet vine”; and from the sweetness of “a kiss beneath wisteria” to the bitterness of 9/11 and its aftermath (“the dark / rain and stutter of the bombs on the other / side of the world”).

Nature is one of Pass’s particular passions, but he also finds existential lessons in, say, the act of parallel parking. Abuzz with “excesses, complexities, entanglements,” Stumbling in the Bloom is the kind of tour de force that fellow poets may find intoxicating, even if it’s a head-spinning experience for general readers.

Pass has close competition, literally, from Sharon Thesen — both writers teach at Vancouver’s Capilano College. The Good Bacteria is Thesen’s eighth collection, and it’s her best yet. Irony is the little black dress of Canadian poetry, and in her send-ups of modern life’s absurdities, Thesen is a writer who wears it well. Her work is reminiscent of improvisational jazz in its impressionistic flow, sharp phrasing and cool nonchalance.

Courtesy House of Anansi Press.

The heart of the book is a compelling long poem about being driven from her home by wildfires; it’s full of evocative descriptions like “bark’s carbonic crust” and the image of singed tree trunks as “extinct matchsticks, leaning / tip to tip.” Elsewhere, Thesen admits affection for “the trifling, / the nonsensical.” She’s not kidding — a sandwich gets the mock-heroic treatment in the hilarious poem “Lunch”:

The tomato like a crying child bride was brutally
wed to a tuna. And under plastic
grew very round in the innocent Arctic
while nearby giant icebergs calved. Then
cold, cold upon my sandwich lay
in fishy icy slices…

This is the third time Thesen has been a finalist for the award. Three’s the charm? Or will she, like her sandwich, be toast?

Courtesy House of Anansi Press.

Thesen’s up against a fellow Anansi author who’s been cited by Time magazine as “one of the best things to happen to poetry in Canada.” Heady praise, indeed. But Toronto poet and editor Ken Babstock’s Airstream Land Yacht, his third collection, proves he deserves the accolades. An Airstream Land Yacht, in case you’re wondering, is a deluxe RV, and by all accounts a smooth ride and a luxurious way to hit the road. This poetry collection is a deluxe model, too, full of striking images and exhilarating turns of phrase. These dense, intricate poems should be read out loud to appreciate their satisfying aural crunch. Take, for instance, Babstock’s description of an army cadet:

…He
was all camo, enactment-of-shrubbery, semblance

of flora in varying shades, hues, mottlements
of green. A helmet dangled on his back, a hillock
in spring, sprouting a version of verdant grasses

in plastic…

Elsewhere, Babstock writes of seeing the aurora borealis while camping in Algonquin Park: “that night entire became a darkroom developing / its notion of a thing outside the visible.” Babstock has plenty of curiosity about things “outside the visible”: many of the poems are musings on the fallibility of perception. But he also honours the tangible world and the evidence of the senses; his poems bristle with viscerally resonant phrases, such as “a storm with snow / like atomized iron, part chandelier part bomb.”

The Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky once wrote that “Poetry is accelerated thinking.” In Airstream Land Yacht, Babstock puts the pedal to the metal (and sometimes leaves accessibility in his dust). He’d be a worthy winner, though when it comes to full-throttle power, Dionne Brand’s Inventory is also a blockbuster.

Courtesy McClelland & Stewart.

The Toronto poet and novelist’s ninth collection is a brooding, book-length meditation on the events and zeitgeist of the early years of this millennium. It’s partly an impassioned lament for our troubled world of war and environmental destruction, partly a catalogue of forgotten atrocities and partly a bittersweet, defiant celebration of life’s fleeting pleasures. Brand doesn’t wow the reader with fancy phrasing, but there’s an incantatory power to her meditations nonetheless. In one poem, for instance, she pays grim tribute to the anonymous casualties of violence, in an attempt to counteract the desensitizing effect of daily news reports:

If they’re numb over there, and all around her,
she’ll gather the nerve endings
spilled on the streets, she’ll count them like rice grains

she’ll keep them for when they’re needed
…
she’ll store the nerve endings in glass
coloured bottles on a tree near the doorsteps,
for divine fierce years to come…

Brand has won the GG previously (for her 1997 collection, Land to Light On), and in a strong field of sophisticated stylists, Inventory stands out for its political urgency, as well as its almost liturgical cadences.

Could it come out on top? Really, it’s too close to call.

Winners of this year’s Governor General’s Literary Awards will be announced Nov. 21.

Toronto writer and editor Barbara Carey has published three collections of poetry.

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