A young woman reads in a bookstore. The finalists for the 2008 Governor General's Award for English-language poetry include both established writers and promising newcomers. (Daniel Garcia/AFP/Getty Images)

The Governor General’s Award doesn’t boast the richest purse for Canadian poetry in English — that distinction belongs to the Griffin Poetry Prize. But the “GG,” as it’s familiarly known, is a kind of literary fall classic with its own cachet. As a whole, the GGs — which hand out prizes in 14 literature categories — are the country’s longest-running literary awards. Established in 1939, the Canada Council has administered them since 1959, and the prize money has grown from $250 in 1951 to $25,000.

The finalists for this year’s award in English-language poetry were revealed on Oct. 21, as selected by a jury of poets comprising Pier Giorgio di Cicco of Toronto, Winnipeg's Di Brandt and Vancouverite Connie Fife. The winner will be announced Nov. 18.

Traditionally, the list is weighted toward established writers with a nod or two to new — or relatively new — voices. This year’s list, surprisingly, tilts in the opposite direction: Two books are debut collections and another two are sophomore efforts. A range of styles is represented, but all of the books share a strong moral engagement, whether expressed as personal soul-searching or a wider-focus pondering of humanity’s political and social values.

The sole seasoned pro among the finalists is A.F. Moritz, who teaches at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College and has garnered a clutch of honours for his previous work (including a GG nomination and a Guggenheim Fellowship).

(House of Anansi)

The elaborate narrative poems in The Sentinel, Moritz’s 15th collection, glide down the page in line after elegant line — even though what Moritz is often describing (in cinematic detail) is disturbing. Many of the most compelling poems depict a ruined civilization and seem to be set in the near future, though there are also echoes of antiquity. Moritz writes of environmental devastation (“oily swamps” and “spacious streams/now gone from Earth”) and catastrophes, though the bleakness of these prophetic visions is balanced in other poems by optimism about “the healing exuberance of nature.”

Whether dire or hopeful, Moritz’s poems are packed with biblical and literary allusions, Dante and Homer most prominently. But you needn’t be schooled in the classics to be drawn in to them. The evocative imagery and phrasing conduct their own emotional charge, as in the following description of a soulless suburb:

Some of the streets

are edgeless lava flows of blacktop that pass

and isolate rows of houses with human heads

stacked in the windows looking out at the nothing to look out at

As the most established of this year’s finalists, Moritz may seem the obvious favourite. But given that the shortlist is dominated by newer voices, the field seems wide open.

Like Moritz’s work, Ruth Roach Pierson’s second collection, Aide-Mémoire, is freighted with a range of cultural references. In form and focus, the Toronto poet’s book is the most traditional of the finalists. Her poems are graceful meditations on time-honoured subjects like mortality and aging (which she calls, wryly, “the new invisibility”). For this former historian, the past is not a “nostalgic cocoon” so much as the basis for a reflection on the instabilities of the wider world. As she puts it:

I’m like a mirror held up to the larger

mayhem, unable to live in anything

but clutter, the chaos of books, files,

papers strewn over scuffed floors.

That image of domestic disorder is, in fact, coyly misleading. Although Roach Pierson packs plenty into her poems, there’s nothing untidy about the language and rhythms. She sifts through memories like a prospector panning for gold, and comes up with much that’s valuable.

(misFit)

In More To Keep Us Warm, his debut collection, Toronto poet Jacob Scheier also recasts personal experience while paying tribute to other writers and philosophers. But his poetic voice is more plainly conversational and emotionally candid — he seems to eschew fancy phrases on principle. This is the work of a thoughtful young writer trying to figure out his political stance and place in the world. Scheier writes of grief (for his mother, the late poet Libby Scheier), desire and loneliness with frankness and often a personable humour. In one poem, he writes,

I’m not a Buddhist,

I just hate stuff.

It’s different from detachment —

I am very attached to my hatred of things.

I am taking a stand,

maybe even declaring war

on dining sets and colour co-ordination.

Elsewhere, Scheier comments (tongue in cheek?) that his writing is “too narrative, too personal.” But it’s his honesty and directness that make More To Keep Us Warm most appealing.

The final two contenders, The Invisibility Exhibit by Vancouver poet Sachiko Murakami and Noise from the Laundry by Calgary’s Weyman Chan, are both published by Talonbooks, a West Coast imprint whose poetry list tends toward the formally adventurous. The Invisibility Exhibit is Murakami’s response to a real-life horror story: the disappearance (and presumed murder) in recent years of dozens of women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside district. Her poems aren’t reportage, however. Convicted killer Robert Pickton isn’t even named — and in one poem he’s even seen, creepily, within the framework of a beloved fairy tale:

The carriage rolls up to the corner.

In it, the prince’s face, shadowed;

we see instead that shoe turned up

as evidence. What else? The parts

that fit into other parts, unearthed

self, her bartered sex. We knew

when her shoe dropped he had found her

At heart, Murakami’s unsettling, provocative work is an indictment of society’s combination of indifference and morbid fascination — as she puts it in one poem, “her trauma is to you theoretical.” The taut, fragmented poems play tensely between the banality of affluent Vancouverites’ everyday concerns (“We have a few pounds to lose, but who doesn’t?/ We have to pick up the dry cleaning — don’t forget!”) and the danger that marginalized women face (“five times more likely to die violent”). In the final poem, Murakami writes of forensic specialists restoring identity to the “invisible” victims, thus protecting “the whole of the woman contained there.” Her work of drawing connections is just as painstaking.

(Talon Books)

In one poem in Chan’s Noise from the Laundry, his second collection, he writes, “Old dialectics like good and evil stay with me.” The question of how to act with integrity underlies many of his poems, which are less like linear narratives than intricate reveries richly threaded with reminiscences, dreams, musings on his cultural heritage (his parents emigrated from China) and even the occasional encounter with a spirit guide in the form of a sage old man or an oracle-like white rabbit.

In a powerfully affecting poem about human folly and our capacity for resilience, Chan describes an elderly Japanese woman folding origami papers:

building them with her good hand into a crane sunning on one foot.

It fits my hand like a small echo chamber

a scrolling Arabic

or a wing

As it turns out, the woman is a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima. With her “once burnt/but now consolable hand” she fashions something beautiful, “an art that’s not deluded/by inexperience,/or fooled through old attachments.”

Chan’s poems are themselves as delicate and resonant as that paper crane. Whether he’ll walk off with this year’s Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry on Nov. 18 is anyone’s guess. But he definitely deserves to be in such good company.

The winner of the 2008 Governor General's Award for English-language poetry will be announced Nov. 18.

Barbara Carey is a Toronto writer and critic.