2006 Finalists - Poetry
Ken Babstock, Toronto, for Airstream Land Yacht
(House of Anansi Press; distributed by HarperCollins Canada) (ISBN 0-88784-740-4)
Ken Babstock’s Airstream Land Yacht illuminates contemporary life and ideas. Here is the music of the mind at work, a voice at once wry and philosophically penetrating.
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Elizabeth Bachinsky, Maple Ridge (BC), for Home of Sudden Service
(Nightwood Editions; distributed by Harbour Publishing) (ISBN 0-88971-212-3)
Bold yet sophisticated, Home of Sudden Service is populated with outcasts, and valley girls and boys ignited by a “trailer park fire of the mind.” Elizabeth Bachinsky introduces contemporary content to classical forms, and makes them startlingly new.
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Dionne Brand, Toronto, for Inventory
(McClelland & Stewart; distributed by Random House of Canada) (ISBN 0-7710-1662-X)
Dionne Brand’s Inventory makes music and sense of our complex age. This book is passionate, incantatory, building to lyrical outrage.
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John Pass, Madeira Park (BC), for Stumbling in the Bloom
(Oolichan Books; distributed by University of Toronto Press) (ISBN 0-88982-201-8)
John Pass balances intellect and humility in Stumbling in the Bloom. His poems celebrate the natural world, while painting portraits of our flawed but singular “human family.”
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Sharon Thesen, Lake Country (BC), for The Good Bacteria
(House of Anansi Press; distributed by HarperCollins Canada)
(ISBN 0-88784-746-3)
Sharon Thesen’s The Good Bacteria is wonderfully witty and droll. Here, elegiac elements are brought down to earth with shining realism.
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