Stanza and deliver

Montreal poet Nicole Brossard, one of the nominees for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize. (Coach House Press)

Size matters when it comes to literary awards, and in Canada, there’s nothing bigger than the Griffin Poetry Prize. The Griffin Trust, which administers the award for works written in or translated into English, shells out $100,000 annually, with half going to a Canadian title and the other half to an international one.

This year’s finalists were announced April 8; the winners will be proclaimed June 4. Judges George Bowering (Canada’s first poet laureate), American poet James Lasdun and Mexico’s Pura López Colomé read a staggering 509 submissions from 31 countries to arrive at a shortlist of three Canadian and four international titles. (Presumably, they also put their lives on hold to do so.)

Size also seems to matter when it comes to this year’s shortlists. All of the finalists have published a substantial body of work; in fact, six of the seven shortlisted books are volumes of selected or collected work.

On the Canadian front, the finalists might be described as the old guard of the avant-garde. They’re all groundbreakers whose distinctive styles have been influential. Montreal poet and novelist Nicole Brossard, whose career spans four decades, is a pioneer of experimental feminist writing. Her collection Notebook of Roses and Civilization was translated by novelist and playwright Robert Majzels and poet Erin Mouré, who has twice been up for the Griffin for her own work. (Notebook was also a finalist for the 2007 Governor General’s Award for translation.) It is Mouré and Majzels who will share the award if Brossard’s work is selected as the winner.

(Coach House Press)

As the title suggests, Brossard’s book is a meditation on both love (roses) and the social world (civilization), particularly the language we conventionally use to describe it — “the puzzle of proper nouns,” as Brossard puts it. Most of the book consists of brief, elliptical poems whose images hang together as a delicate skein of associations. In the first poem, the “blue melt backlit” of water in winter becomes, in effect, the colour of the past, and there’s a shift from that image to “life suddenly in thin chemise/steadfast/in questions and old silences.”

Brossard goes on to sift through memories of love affairs — “glimmers of intoxications” — and to draw in the public realm, too, with its “cemeteries, discos/security zones/war measures.” As always, she balances deftly the abstract and the sensual. But this is the only book in the bunch that’s a single volume of poems, and that may be a disadvantage.

David McFadden is the crowd pleaser of the Canadian trio. His collection of selected poems Why Are You So Sad proves that a poet can be funny and yet be taken seriously. The Toronto wordsmith has published almost two dozen collections in the course of five decades. His chatty, rambling narratives are the opposite of what might be called “ivory tower poetics.” They’re more like lunch-counter or street-corner poetics, with a dash of surrealism. Reflections on aging, beauty, politics and the absurdities of urban life all have a place in his work. He also has a strong whimsical streak. In POP, for instance, he moves from a description of blowing up a balloon for his daughter to the comment, “it would be nice if books/came in adjustable type/& nice if I could blow myself up/into John Keats’ size.”

It’s hard to resist a poet who can make you laugh out loud. But in their offhand way, McFadden’s poems can also be surprisingly poignant:

I can draw power
from the ground
up through my legs
to make my heart
shine like a searchlight.

(University of California Press)

Robin Blaser’s The Holy Forest is as formidable as McFadden’s work is affable. The Vancouver poet, a key figure in avant-garde poetry in North America, has already received a lifetime achievement award (in 2006) from the Griffin Trust, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see this hefty volume of his collected work, dating back to 1956, take the Canadian prize.

Written in a style that U.S. poet Charles Bernstein describes as “lyric collage,” these complex, allusive poems incorporate references to numerous other writers and thinkers. Interestingly, over time, Blaser’s work has gotten progressively sparer. Indeed, the final poem here is a one-liner: “language is love.”

As cerebral as Blaser’s work is, you needn’t brush up on Dante or Pindar (whose work he engages with in a series called Great Companions) to enjoy it. He’s also keenly attentive to the everyday world, and his poems brim with striking phrases and metaphors. “I took a cup of wild courage out of the Charles River” is his expressive way of saying he decided to quit a job. Elsewhere, in a poem about Halloween, “the winking pumpkin” becomes the “sweet, burned face/of imagination.”

(HarperCollins Canada)

On the international side, John Ashbery has won almost every major American prize and has been called “a national treasure” by the New York Times Book Review. The Griffin may be next. Notes from the Air brings together poems from the last two decades, and as that title suggests, there’s something about Ashbery’s work that captures the zeitgeist of America — a sense of uncertainty, disquiet and a preoccupation with the superficial. As he puts it in one poem, “Today, a day that makes very little sense,/like America,/in clear disarray.”

Ashbery has commented that his poems are about “the experience of experience,” and as such, they are often enigmatic. As the speakers in his poems prattle on, the diction frequently shifts from highbrow to slang, thus panning over different styles of speech. Still, he’s a throwback to the Romantics in his concern with the passage of time and the inevitability of loss. He can also be touchingly lyrical:

The evening light was like honey in the trees
When you left me and walked to the end of the street
Where the sunset abruptly ended.
The wedding-cake drawbridge lowered itself
To the fragile forget-me-not flower.
You climbed aboard.

Ashbery may face his stiffest competition from a poet who’s dead. The Peruvian writer César Vallejo, who died in 1938, is widely considered one of the giants of 20th-century poetry. The Complete Poetry: César Vallejo was translated by Clayton Eshleman, who will be the one to receive the prize should the volume win. At more than 700 pages, it’s a monumental opus that covers the gamut from politics to love to theology. Vallejo’s early poems speak with anguished directness (“There are blows in life, so powerful…I don’t know!/Blows as from the hatred of God”), but as his work evolved, it also became more complex and experimental, as if linguistic conventions had to be broken to make the language more expressive. In effect, it turns into a private code that is nonetheless often evocative:

the greek jack of diamonds turns into
a swarthy jack of islands,
a coppery jack of lakes
facing moribund alexandria,
cuzco moribund

(Faber and Faber Ltd.)

David Harsent’s Selected Poems: 1969-2005 is the most traditional book on either list, with its tight-wound rhythms and sharply etched, lyrical images drawn from the landscape. But this is no idyllic pastoral. There’s plenty of human drama — stormy marriages, shipwrecks, war — in the British poet’s multi-layered, atmospheric poems and a cast of characters that includes a brutal huntsman and a sniper. The mood of Churching is typical:

Black weather days on end.
No one could stand
in the wind up on that tor.
They clung to headstones, backs
Bent, and crept to church.

The way I see it, New Yorker Elaine Equi has only an outside chance in this race, but her collection Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems is at the head of the class in horseplay. An infectious blend of absurdity, irreverence and wordplay, her poems are spare in style but extravagant in fancifulness. “What kind of body would you have if you could/gain time instead of weight?” she ponders in one poem. But while she’s having fun, she’s also spoofing things like gym culture, celebrity worship and consumerism. Invocation summons her contemporary version of the Muses:

Come Inspiration,

sweet as two beautiful hookers
in a dream.

Don’t go girls —

even if you don’t know a thing
about poetry,

at least help me decide
what to wear.

Equi will have to call on those wardrobe advisors for the Griffin gala in June, where winners will be announced.

Barbara Carey is a Toronto writer and critic.

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