Best Collection

• 2009: Don Paterson, Rain (Faber)
• 2008: Mick Imlah, The Lost Leader (Faber)
• 2007: Sean O’Brien, The Drowned Book (Picador)
• 2006: Robin Robertson, Swithering (Picador)
• 2005: David Harsent, Legion (Faber & Faber)
• 2004: Kathleen Jamie, The Tree House (Picador)
• 2003: Ciarán Carson, Breaking News (The Gallery Press)
• 2002: Peter Porter, Max is Missing (Picador)
• 2001: Sean O’Brien, Downriver (Picador)
• 2000: Michael Donaghy, Conjure (Picador)
• 1999: Jo Shapcott, My Life Asleep (OUP)
• 1998: Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (Faber)
• 1997: Jamie McKendrick, The Marble Fly (OUP)
• 1996: John Fuller, Stones and Fires (Chatto & Windus)
• 1995: Sean O’Brien, Ghost Train (OUP)
• 1994: Alan Jenkins, Harm (Chatto & Windus)
• 1993: Carol Ann Duffy, Mean Time (Anvil Press)
• 1992: Thom Gunn, The Man with Night Sweats (Faber)

I’m about to list a bunch of award winning works of poetry so as to access their titles easily when I need to…namely, in wifi zones near far flung used bookstores. Please bear with me.

Recipients of the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry or drama

• 1937: E. J. Pratt, The Fable of the Goats
• 1938: Kenneth Leslie, By Stubborn Stars
• 1939: Arthur S. Bourinot Under the Sun
• 1940: E. J. Pratt, Brébeuf and His Brethren
• 1941: Anne Marriott, Calling Adventurers
• 1942: Earle Birney, David and Other Poems
• 1943: A.J.M. Smith, News of the Phoenix
• 1944: Dorothy Livesay, Day and Night
• 1945: Earle Birney, Now is Time
• 1946: Robert Finch, Poems
• 1947: Dorothy Livesay, Poems for People
• 1948: A.M. Klein, The Rocking Chair and Other Poems
• 1949: James Reaney, The Red Heart
• 1950: James Wreford Watson, Of Time and the Lover
• 1951: Charles Bruce, The Mulgrave Road
• 1952: E.J. Pratt, Towards the Last Spike
• 1953: Douglas LePan, The Net and the Sword
• 1954: P.K. Page, The Metal and the Flower
• 1955: Wilfred Watson, Friday’s Child
• 1956: Robert A.D. Ford, A Window on the North
• 1957: Jay Macpherson, The Boatman
• 1958: James Reaney, A Suit of Nettles
• 1959: Irving Layton, Red Carpet for the Sun
• 1960: Margaret Avison, Winter Sun
• 1961: Robert Finch, Acis in Oxford
• 1962: James Reaney, Twelve Letters to a Small Town
  
• 1963: (none)
• 1964: Raymond Souster, The Colour of the Times
• 1965: Al Purdy, The Cariboo Horses
• 1966: Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game
• 1967: Alden Nowlan, Bread, Wine and Salt and Eli Mandel, An Idiot Joy
• 1968: Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems 1956–68
• 1969: George Bowering, Rocky Mountain Foot and The Gangs of Kosmos and
• Gwendolyn MacEwen, The Shadow-Maker
• 1970: Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and
• bpNichol, "The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid"
• 1971: John Glassco, Selected Poems
• 1972: John Newlove, Lies and Dennis Lee, Civil Elegies and Other Poems
• 1973: Miriam Mandel, Lions at her Face
• 1974: Ralph Gustafson, Fire on Stone
• 1975: Milton Acorn, The Island Means Minago
• 1976: Joe Rosenblatt, Top Soil
• 1977: D.G. Jones, Under the Thunder the Flowers Light Up the Earth
• 1978: Patrick Lane, Poems New and Selected
• 1979: Michael Ondaatje, There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do
• 1980: Stephen Scobie, McAlmon’s Chinese Opera

Incoming search terms:

• list of governor general award winners

Two views of Pop Art

Incoming search terms:

• any warhol was the stupidest man

Interesting how 900-odd pages of printed words can hold you rapt for days and weeks – a lifetime even – while a movie about their creator – filled with sounds and sights, costumes and effects, speech and music – can’t even keep you occupied for two hours.

Lush, inviting camera-work, plaintive Windham Hillian pianos and oboes, evocative period sets, verdant, foggy landscapes, frilly costumes…none can save this film. I can only recommend ‘non-participation in and open resistance to its evils’.

Love, legacy, historiography, gaps between beliefs and practices, private and public domains. All themes ripe for exploration. The life-blood of Tolstoy’s work, treated anemically.

Tolstoyans devoting themselves to living lives Tolstoy espoused but never lived; to shaping legend from lie. The complex contradictions of love. Internecine scrapping over copyright and wills. Samovars, horse-drawn carriages, wood-chopping and virgin sex…all there, but dumb, unexplored. Nothing clever or profound, a thin storyline; all surface. Pond-scum.

James McAvoy is his usual  twitish self, flustered, innocent, shy  – welling up and sneezing splendidly on demand; (pass the pepper). Christopher Plummer at least looks the part. Sage and watery-eyed (more pepper). Helen Mirren, the wife, and Paul Giamatti, Tolstoy’s moustache-twisting buddy, throw a few decent shit-fits, and lots of mean glares, but they’re all pepper, no steak.

The Last Station is proof that despite all the technical accoutrements and human talent  ‘money can buy’, without words on the page: dialogue – or at least some sort of advancing plot -: without good writers, all you have is histrionics.

This film though pleasing, at times to the eye, is mostly a boring, irritating waste of time; diametrically opposed to the experience of reading War and Peace. It does a disservice to its subject. Not even Kerry Condon’s breasts can save it.

Writing in the Winter 2009 Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies newsletter Kenneth J. Plako tells us:

"The Internet and the Google library project mark the end of the out-of-print/used bookseller. We say this with a heavy heart; the noble profession has existed ever since words were first put on paper.

In the past the bookseller acted as a guardian of knowledge by purchasing, storing, and selling books…

Google’s powerful search capacity becomes the new intermediary, matching the information seeker to the information. Thus the end of the out-of-print and used bookseller. A decentralized market consisting of thousands of idiosyncratic, individualistic, professional booksellers selling books containing information now becomes a centralized market controlled by corporations running on the business model, selling access to information…

Individuals who believe that words deserve letterpress printing, marbled and handmade papers, original artwork, and a fine binding define the book as a physical object with aesthetic appeal, not ephemeral electronic bytes…In these uncertain times, I suggest we all visit a "bricks and mortar" bookshop operated by an independant bookseller. If you can, bring a child or young adult with you and buy them and yourself a book. Bring the book home, hold it, admire it, and read it…"

(…or a used bookstore for that matter)…

I scoped out the Experimental Farm’s annual used book sale this morning. Arrived about half an hour after the gates opened. Dealers had already done their damage, although I did come away with a signed copy of Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Governor General’s Award winning novel Man Descending (please do contact me if you collect GGs: I have a fair number of duplicate copies, some signed, that I’d be happy to sell/trade)

After the starting-gate rush has subsided, slowly, carefully work your way through sections of choice, again watching for books with DJs in good shape. Look particularly for pre-1920 jacketed titles, and buy them. They’re scarce, and you should always get good trade-in value for them when you visit your local used/antiquarian bookstore.

Stay tuned: I’ll be parceling out more tips on how best to bag the books you want as the summer goes on.

This from Quill and Quire:  Former Penguin Canada president David Davidar has hit back at claims by ex-employee Lisa Rundle that he had sexually harassed her over a three-year period. Via his lawyer, Peter Downard:

"David Davidar has not sexually harassed anyone. He has not assaulted anyone. David Davidar had a consensual, flirtatious relationship that grew out of a close friendship with a colleague. He deeply regrets the hurt this has caused his wife.

Ms. Rundle and Mr. Davidar kissed on two occasions…contrary to Ms. Rundle’s claim, Mr. Davidar did not bully his way into her room, nor did he force himself upon her. Ms. Rundle did not object when they kissed. After the kiss, Ms. Rundle said she wanted to take a nap, as she was feeling jet-lagged. She asked Mr. Davidar to wake her up in an hour."

Here’s our exclusive video footage of what really happened:

(via the incomparable piony) ….relativity can be fun, thanks to Ramamurti Shankar, Yale University. His talk of trains reminds me of Jacob Bronowski’s lucid description of the theory of relativity in The Ascent of Man. Here, thanks to Google and Internet, you can watch the brilliant Bronowski as he talks about how the structure of nature is translated into numbers.  And, more impressively, apropos Newton, Einstein et al, Bronowski’s take on the matter (at around the 33 minute mark).

"Good criticism is not about “argument”, if “argument” is understood as contradiction. To say “this is not good” without giving the grounds for that evaluation is not “argument”. It’s the assertion of an opinion. when Starnino gave his opinion on Christian Bok, he distorted what the Oulipo is. as far as I’m concerned, he simply lied in order to put a negative spin on oulipean thought. he gave FALSE grounds for his opinion. when Solway dismissed a poem by Al Purdy, he presented himself as unable to understand elements in Purdy’s poem. he did this in order to suggest the poem under consideration was unworthy, but Solway is capable of great subtlety when he deals with what he likes."

with this from Carmine Starnino toward the end of his introduction to A Lover’s Quarrel, a collection of essays and reviews:

"Anger can itself be affirmative – ‘Passions face both ways’ writes William Logan – and being ‘anti’ can be an act of recovery, an effort to recapture and reanimate aspects of the tradition that have been forgotten. True, the act of repudiation plays itself out so routinely in these pieces that a reader may think I see reviewing as an easy opportunity for fisticuffs. I agree that contrariansism can be profoundly habit-forming, but in my case I simply don’t believe that unanimity, and the complacency it can breed, is always a desirable state. I’m interested, instead, in the energy that comes from argument and disputation. I believe that the most important of the critical community’s tasks is to frustrate the uncontested stattus of certain ideas which is why sympathy is something I’ve always pursued reluctantly: reviewing that seeks out those prinicples that best flatter a work of poetry forgoes its conscience and becomes a rather creepy form of collusion. I’ve always taken to heart the maxim inscribed on the wall of Montaigne’s library: ‘To any reason an equal reason can be opposed.’

What is to be wished for? As I see it,  something quite simple: passionate, intelligent, heated, civil, good-willed, good-humoured, rational exchange, with no fighting, no biting, no fibbing, no name-calling and a tiny – if only for a step or two -  bit of moccasin swapping.