The pen is mighty

(Wilfrid Laurier University Press)

Don McKay (St. John's)

McKay has twice won the Governor General's Award, along with the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection Strike/Slip. If metaphor is the lightsaber of poetry, he is the supreme Jedi master — in evocative poems about longing and loss, the tools of human civilization and the natural world (a wildflower is "a shy/hoister of flags, a tiny lamp to read by, one/word at a time"). McKay can sidle up to existential questions by way of a softball game, and his use of the vernacular hums. The metaphysical has never had such a witty, avuncular spokesperson.

Best work: Strike, Slip (2006)

(House of Anansi)

Ken Babstock (Toronto)

Babstock also brilliantly melds ear-pleasing diction and big ideas (like the nature of consciousness). He's the poetry editor of House of Anansi Press as well as the author of three accomplished collections. His latest and most boldly ambitious, Airstream Land Yacht, nabbed the 2007 Trillium Award and was a finalist for both the GG and the Griffin.

Babstock can play by traditional rules, but he's also a maverick whose free verse is an aural pleasure. The operative word is "play," whether he's musing on the unreliability of perception or describing a flat tire ("like a black/Dali clock/ a cooling puddle of lava,/complete with its own vicious hiss).

Best work: Airstream Land Yacht (2006)

(Vehicule Press)

Mary Dalton (St. John's)

Auden wrote of "A poet's hope: to be,/like some valley cheese,/local, but prized elsewhere." Newfoundlander Mary Dalton 's poetry has what she calls "the salt accent" of her native island — and that's what makes her last two books special. In Merrybegot and Red Ledger, the discipline of traditional verse meets the robust dialect of the island — where else would you hear words like "blather-skite" and "macadandies"? Check out Merrybegot for its lively rendering of outport life in trim, pitch-perfect dramatic monologues ("It's so barren down there/a crow's got to bring/A stick to pitch on.")

Best work: Merrybegot (2003)

(Jason Chow/McClelland & Stewart)

Dionne Brand (Toronto)

In Inventory, a book-length meditation on life in the 21st century, Dionne Bran d writes of wanting to "gather the nerve endings/spilled on the streets." The Toronto poet, who emigrated here from Trinidad in 1970, is possibly our best writer about contemporary urban experience. (The author of nine books of poetry, as well as fiction and non-fiction, she's won the GG and the Trillium, and been a Griffin finalist). Check out Thirsty for its depiction of tumultuous city life, or Inventory for its political urgency and incantatory lyric intensity. ("Let us not invoke the natural world,/it's ravaged like any battlefield, like any tourist/island, like any ocean we care to name.")

Best work: Inventory (2006)

(Brick Books)

Don Domanski (Halifax)

"I see no difference between poetry and spiritual practice," Don Domanski commented in an interview after his eighth collection, All Our Wonder Unavenged, won the 2007 GG. Domanski's meditative vision transforms the secular world from the ground up (blades of grass cast "the shadows of eternity's alphabet"; a flock of finches taking flight is "like all the holy places/pulling away at once from the earth"). Though he has his eye on the cosmic, his entrancing images are rooted in familiar surroundings. As he puts it in one poem, and demonstrates repeatedly throughout the book, "The universe is held in small things/for safekeeping."

Best work: All Our Wonder Unavenged (2007)

(Insomniac Press)

David McGimpsey (Montreal)

Sometimes I'm not in the mood for the profound; I just want to laugh. That's when I turn to David McGimpsey, whose mashup of kitschy pop culture and high-toned literary references is hilarious. Take Sitcom, his latest collection (he's published three). McGimpsey often writes in the voice of a loser, the type who gets told, "In the end … it was just too hard/to remember your phone number" as a kiss-off, and whose achievements include "the art of the bummed smoke" and "the delayed comeback zinger." You'd have to be a dedicated couch potato, and have paid special attention in English class, to catch every allusion. But that doesn't spoil the fun.

Best work: Sitcom (2007)

(Coteau Books)

Skydancer Louise Bernice Halfe (Saskatoon)

Cree poet Skydancer Louise Bernice Halfe, who was raised on the Saddle Lake Indian Reserve in northern Alberta and now lives in Saskatoon, has published three books. She's on this list because of one stellar collection, The Crooked Good, a powerful, book-length tale that blends family history, archival material and spellbinding legend. (A spooky spirit called Rolling Head plays a leading role.) The main narrator is ê-kwêskit, or Turn-Around Woman, whose storytelling keeps cultural traditions alive: "Ancient legends work their way/into how I've tasted, ate and swallowed my life./I reframe them, hoping they will live another way./The wise live in the lake, sway in the tall grass,/light up the universe in the prairie storm").

Best work: The Crooked Good (2007)

(Coach House Books)

Jeramy Dodds (Orono, Ont.)

Dodds's wild and woolly debut collection, Crabwise to the Hounds, made this year's Griffin shortlist and I wouldn't be surprised to see him walk off with the coveted prize. Dodds may be a small-town type of guy, but there's nothing parochial about his work. He writes about music, literature, science and, especially, the animal kingdom — often from a sideways, surrealistic angle. The wow factor? Dodds's virtuoso turns of phrase and vivid, surprising images (The sound of a tuba is "full of fog and fallen thoroughbreds"; a German shepherd looks "like/a reconstructed grenade. Pelt burdened/by burrs").

Best work: Crabwise to the Hounds (2008)

(House of Anansi)

Erin Mouré (Montreal)

The work of this poet and translator is often confounding. But it's also brilliantly innovative, which is why Mouré has either won or been shortlisted for all the major Canadian poetry prizes since her first collection garnered a Governor General's nomination in 1979. Most poets find a comfortable groove and dig in for the long haul; Mouré has been restless. She has shifted from poems of idiosyncratic phrasing ("Sometimes there is an emptiness huge/as a bottle of whisky,/hard & glass, caught inside me") to dense, cerebral meditations inspired by literary theory, to a wisecracking "transelation" of a Portuguese pastoral poet and then to evocative, simple lyrics ("In the onion, there's/something of fire. That fire known as/Fog. The onion is the way/fog has of entering the earth.") She's one of our best — and most audacious — at expanding the possibilities of language.

Best work: Little Theatres (2005)

(Frontenac House Press)

Sheri-D Wilson (Calgary)

Spoken word is at a big disadvantage when it's seen (on the printed page) but not heard. It should really have its own top 10, but since it doesn't, I'll give a shout-out to Calgary spoken word artist Sheri-D Wilson. Her syncopated, rhyming riffs owe a lot to the Beats, but with a strong feminist streak. You can check out her latest books (Re: Zoom or Autopsy of a Turvy World) but the best way to sample Wilson's work is to catch her in action — say, in the video poem "Surf Rave Girly Girrl," or on CD.

Best work: Re:Cord (CD, 2007)