2007 Griffin Poetry Prize winners announced
Date: June 11, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Winners of the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize have been announced. The International Award goes to Charles Wright for his Scar Tissue, while the Canadian Winner is Don McKay for Strike/Slip.
The C$100,000 poetry prize has been awarded annually since 2000, and aims to “serve and encourage excellence in poetry written in or translated into English anywhere in the world.”

INTERNATIONAL WINNER: Scar Tissue
by Charles Wright
In his new collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright investigates the tenuous relationship between description and actuality–”thing is not an image”–but also reaffirms the project of attempting to describe, to capture the natural world and the beings in it, although he reminds us that landscape is not his subject matter but his technique: that language was always his subject–language and “the ghost of god.” And in the dolomites, the clouds, stars, wind, and water that populate these poems, “something un-ordinary persists.”
You can read more about Scar Tissue at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.

CANADIAN WINNER: Strike/Slip
by Don McKay
In this extraordinary collection from one of our most celebrated poets, Don McKay walks the strike-slip fault between poetry and landscape, sticks its strange nose into the cold silence of geologic time, meditates on marble, quartz and gneiss, and attends to the songs of ravens and thrushes and to the clamour of the industrialized bush. Behind these poems lies the urge to engage the tectonics of planetary dwelling with the rickety contraption of language, and to register the stress, sheer and strain — but also the astonishment — engendered by that necessary failure.
You can read more about Strike/Slip at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
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Filed under Canadian literature, English literature, Poetry, Winners.
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