Prize Fighters

Erin Mouré. Courtesy The Griffin Trust.

Cash and cachet go together when it comes to literary awards, so it’s no surprise that the Griffin Poetry Prize, which announced the 2006 finalists April 5, is a big deal. The annual prize splits $100,000 between a Canadian winner and an international one, making it the richest haul for a single volume of poetry in the world. It’s also hotly contested: this year’s judges read 441 books, from 15 countries (including translations from 20 languages), in just three months. (On top of their honorarium, they deserve a medal for valour.)

The prize’s importance goes beyond money, for a couple of reasons. First, placing Canadian poetry alongside work from around the world has raised the international profile of our writers. There’s a worldly feel to the jury, too, since it always consists of a Canadian and two international poets. (Total impartiality is impossible to achieve, but as far as the domestic short list is concerned, this set-up seems less clubby than just drawing from our own talent pool. Besides, we’re always curious about how others see us.)

Second, by staging a gala reading and lavish awards ceremony, the Griffin Prize generates a sense of occasion around an art form that doesn’t often bask in the spotlight. The underlying message is not only that poetry matters to the cultural life of this country — it can also be glamorous. It’s a bit like Cinderella, a drudge no longer, stepping out to the ball.

What’s immediately striking about this year’s finalists is that lyric narrative, arguably the most dominant form of poetry in English, is conspicuously absent. Instead, the judges — Britain’s Lavinia Greenlaw, Eliot Weinberger of the United States and Vancouver-based Lisa Robertson — have opted for work that’s non-linear, often flamboyantly unconventional and far ranging in cultural references. In a world increasingly preoccupied with national boundaries, it’s significant that these books embrace a global village of influences. Two books of translation made this year’s international short list, further adding to the cosmopolitan feel.

Here’s a rundown of who’s been touched by the Griffin’s magic wand this year, starting with the Canadian contenders.

In Nerve Squall, Sylvia Legris’s third collection, the Saskatoon poet offers an extended riff on correspondences between stormy weather and neurological events (“nerve-storm,” she explains in a note, is a term for migraine). Her work crackles with exuberant wackiness. “Holy funnel clouds! Whole sky woven of light ribbon and tickertape; whirling currents and / storm dervish,” she writes in one poem. Scattered throughout the book are cartoon-like drawings; her writing has an exaggerated cartoon-like quality, too — it’s full of exclamatory phrases. Legris quotes nursery rhymes and Dr. Seuss, rewrites adages (“Take warning! Take warning! Red ants at morning…”) and generally stirs up a storm of bravura wordplay. This hyperventilating flight of fancy isn’t likely to win, but its inclusion on the short list serves notice that Legris is one to watch. “Take warning!” indeed.

Courtesy Brick Books.

If Nerve Squall is all electricity, Phil Hall’s An Oak Hunch is like the scabby, weathered stump of an old tree, full of what Hall calls (in a typically striking phrase) “treasure-knots in wood.” In this ninth collection, the Toronto writer reinvents the poetic staple of personal anecdote by digging up the “sub-narratives” of a life growing up poor in rural Ontario. The poems encompass family history (“The Great Hunger had destroyed crop after / crop of my ancestors… I had to eat their stories to know them, had / to plant and plow under their little songs in mine”) and tributes to other writers with whom Hall feels a kinship (in a poem about CanLit great Al Purdy, the wind in a cornfield is “the paper applause of an ancient voice”). Hall’s poems are no picnic to read. They’re densely knotted and halting (as he puts it, “Pain — the sharpener / has attached a grindstone”). But their stunning metaphors make An Oak Hunch a strong contender.

If there’s a book on this year’s lists that exemplifies the spirit of openness to global influences, it’s Montreal poet Erin Mouré’s Little Theatres (Teatriños), which may have a slight edge over Hall’s memorable collection. Mouré has always pushed against the conventional boundaries of linguistic expression, and in her polyglot 12th collection, she goes beyond English to include Galician (the language of a region of Spain), Portuguese and Spanish.

In a way, Little Theatres is about being immersed in language; fittingly, the poems are saturated with water imagery (“Latin was our language of birth, we… Spoke this / as if latin were water and we were entering its ocean / with no turning round”). The poems are also about sustenance, both literal (“In the beet there is something of earth. Something of humidity / Something of humility”) and figurative (“we need a language that rings of water”). In Mouré’s work, simple diction can be resonant and richly metaphoric. A runner-up for the Governor General’s Award, Little Theatres could well come out on top in the Griffin.

Courtesy The Griffin Trust.

The international prize is too close to call. The War Works Hard, Elizabeth Winslow’s translation of Iraqi expatriate Dunya Mikhail’s work, is the dark horse because it’s the only exception to the lists’ trend toward non-narrative poetry. Mikhail, exiled since 1990 and now living in Michigan, is unorthodox in her own cultural context. She eschews the ornate lyrical phrasing of Arabic tradition in favor of a forthright poetry of witness that’s often tinged with a sardonic black humour. The opening poem, for instance, startles with its combination of irony and pathos: “What good luck! / She has found his bones. / The skull is also in the bag / the bag in her hand / like all other bags / in all other trembling hands.”

To go from Mikhail’s spare, direct poetic statements to Barbadian Kamua Brathwaite’s Born to Slow Horses, the most stylistically radical finalist, is like stepping from a clearing into a lush rainforest: making a path through its complex meditations can be challenging.

Brathwaite, who’s published more than a dozen collections, calls his style “tidalectics.” As that neologism suggests, his poems pick up scraps from many sources — the musical phrasing of the Caribbean idiom, news reports, African religious ritual and “torn stories lost and nvr told.” Even the typography of the book is idiosyncratic. Still, there’s no disputing his work can be powerful. A chilling sequence called “9/11” captures the horror of that event with broken syntax and a chaotic rush of words: “the body body body bodies pour- / ing from this dark Manhattan strom-/ boli into dim catacoombs of dis- // appearing love & grace & pain & smouldering wound.”

Michael Palmer. Courtesy The Griffin Trust.

The sense of disparate scraps gathered together also shapes San Francisco poet Michael Palmer’s Company of Moths. He’s another veteran, with critical accolades galore (the Village Voice called him “the most influential avant-gardist working”). In one poem he refers to “the remembered world’s // songs and flooded paths / This heap of photographs” — a concise summary of his method, which is flitting but delicately detailed, with the feel of casual jottings about ordinary life (“the scatter song of dailiness,” as he puts it).

The “remembered world” is also a major motif in Ashes for Breakfast, British poet Michael Hofmann’s translation of selected work by Germany’s Durs Grünbein. But personal memory serves more as a connection to wider history and as a wryly derisive comment on the alienated state of contemporary urban existence. “Your walk takes you / Over graves, knocked down to pathway,” he writes in one poem. Elsewhere, he observes that “Half the population / Is stuck in traffic, their watchword: Faster living!”

Grünbein vividly captures the zeitgeist, no question. Will his translator capture the international prize in this year’s Griffin? We’ll find out on June 1.

Toronto writer and editor Barbara Carey has published three collections of poetry. She is also a producer for this year’s edition of CBC’s Canada Reads.

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