Montreal Gazette reviews the 2006 Griffin winners
Literary awards can be a mixed blessing: Designed to reward excellence, they also create inflated expectations. We often hear readers say that they are "pleasantly surprised" by an obscure book and
"generally disappointed" by major award winners.
In Canada, no literary award is more generous or, arguably, more prestigious than the Griffin Poetry Prize. Created in 2000 by Scott Griffin, an auto parts manufacturer, the award has the admirable ambition "to raise public awareness of the crucial role poetry must play in society's cultural life." Each year, the Griffin Prize provides $50,000 (a fortune in the poetry milieu) to one Canadian winner and one international winner, and this international focus has succeeded in putting Canada on the world's literary map.
This year's winning volumes, Sylvia Legris's Nerve Squall and Kamau Brathwaite's Born to Slow Horses, were announced on June 1, and excerpts from all shortlisted volumes are collected in The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology, a version of which is published every spring by House of Anansi Press.
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There is a joke about Canadians being so obsessed with weather that they are capable of watching the Weather Network for entertainment. Sylvia Legris's Nerve Squall extends that conceit to poetry, tracing the point at which the intensity of nature, mental states, language and poetic form collide, fracture and converge.
Nerve Squall, which also recently won the Pat Lowther Award, is reminiscent of - or is - a chronicle of a migraine headache, where the drama of weather pervades the mind and alters reality.
In the volume's opening poem, Barbed, Legris describes the effect of weather on body and mind with piercing intensity:
Neuro-fault line; nervequake; hemicranial. Wind rips into you - a tree split mid-trunk. Blast of sheet-metal lightning, two plates of a skull pried apart. You are frayed optics, mind a double edge.
Winnipeg-born and Saskatoon-based, Legris could have borrowed the title of Henry Kreisel's essay The Prairie as a State of Mind as a subtitle for her volume, since on each page of the book the poet's mind breaks itself down into the sum total of its natural surroundings:
The wind polishes you to granite-postured vigilance then buffets you, eyes first - all open membrane.
Like her brother, artist Peter Legris (who lived for a time in Montreal), she is masterful in experimenting with the visual quality of language, and in expanding the confines of poetic form and content.
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Kamau Brathwaite's Caribbean identity permeates his volume Born to Slow Horses in every imaginable way.
The Barbados-born Brathwaite is self-consciously writing outside of the established English tradition; his language is infused with local dialects, his fonts and typography are radically non-traditional and varied throughout the volume, and even the positioning of words on the page (often right-justified, for example, as opposed to the more common left justification) goes against the grain of common practice. Brathwaite's point is obvious - while his language may be a form of English, his culture lies outside of the white European literary lineage.
The results of Brathwaite's approach are disorienting and dazzling. Brathwaite may be freer with poetic content than any poet working today. Born to Slow Horses contains everything from lyrical poetry and eulogy to epistemological writing and political commentary.
A tour de force in the volume is the long poem Kumina, which mirrors the 21 days of a Jamaican spiritual or memorial service, in this case dedicated to a mourning friend, "DreamChad on the death of her sun Mark" (note that Brathwaite's typography, a key element of the volume, cannot be replicated in this review).
Kumina rivals such elegiac poems as Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam or Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish in the intensity with which it uses poetry to examine the pain of grieving:
something inside here tell me there will be no rest no rest no rest no rest no rest no rest - can be no rest - until I find him - these rock dry-rivva courses - an bring im justice back w / me.
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Awarding the Griffin Prize to these two volumes elevates expectations and raises the question: Is this great poetry?
If we believe that great verse experiments with language, form and content to challenge existing definitions of poetry, then both Griffin winners may be classified among the finest volumes to have been published in recent years.
If, on the other hand, we believe that poetry must move the reader on an intellectual and visceral level, so that the reader is inspired to return to it and re-read again and again, then Born to Slow Horses promises to stand the test of time, while Nerve Squall may remain a brilliant but ephemeral experiment.
Harold Heft is a writer based in Toronto and the author of three books, none of which has won an award - yet.
