The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language. The winning poets receive $65,000 (Cdn) each and an additional $10,000 (Cdn) goes to each shortlisted poet who reads at the annual Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist Readings in Toronto, Canada.
Margaret Avison, Griffin Poetry Prize 2003 Canadian Winner
Margaret Avison was born in 1918 in Galt, Ontario, raised in Regina, Calgary and Toronto, where she completed high school in 1936. She continued her studies at University of Toronto earning a B.A. in 1940 and an M.A. in 1963. Her work has been recognized with two Governor General’s Awards for Poetry (Winter and Sun and No Time), by three honorary doctorates and by an officership in the Order of Canada. One of the poems in Concrete and Wild Carrot (‘Prospecting,’ retitled from ‘An-astronomy’) was awarded first place in the category of the Canadian Church Press Awards for 2000. Her other publications include The Dumbfounding, sunblue, Selected Poems, A Kind of Perseverance (prose) and Not Yet but Still. She was most recently honoured with the the Leslie K. Tarr Award for outstanding contribution to Christian writing and publishing in Canada.
The Porcupine’s Quill published a collection of Margaret Avison’s in three volumes under the title Always Now. Read more about the collection on the Porcupine’s Quill Web site. Avison also completed a collection entitled Momentary Dark, published in early 2006.
Margaret Avison died in July, 2007. Numerous moving tributes to her and her work have been published, including ones in the Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail.
Judges’ Citation
“If beauty, as Alfred North Whitehead defines it, is ‘a quality which finds its exemplification in actual occasions,’ and if beauty is more completely exemplified in ‘imperfection and discord’ than in the ‘perfection of harmony,’ then Margaret Avison’sConcrete and Wild Carrot is an occasion of beauty. Avison’s poetry is also alive in its sublimity and its humility: ‘wonder, readiness, simplicity’ – the gifts of perception Avison attributes to her Christian faith – imbue every poem in this book with a rare spirit of disorderly love. Margaret Avison is a national treasure. For many decades she has forged a way to write, against the grain, some of the most humane, sweet and profound poetry of our time.”
Margaret Avison reads Rising Dust
Rising Dust, by Margaret Avison
Rising Dust
The physiologist says I am well over half water. I feel, look, solid; am though leaky firm. Yet I am composed largely of water. How the composer turned us out this way, even the learned few do not explain. That’s life.
And we’re in need of more water, over and over, repeatedly thirsty, and unclean.
The body of this earth has water under it and over, from where the long winds sough tirelessly over water, or shriek around curved distances of ice.
Sky and earth invisibly breathe skyfuls of water, visible when it finds its own level.
Even in me? Kin to waterfalls and glacial lakes and sloughs and all that flows and surges, yet I go steadily, or without distillation climb at will (until a dissolution nobody anticipates).
I’m something else besides. The biochemist does not concern himself with this. It too seems substance, A vital bond threaded on an as-if loom out there. The strand within thrums and shudders and twists. It cleaves to this colour or texture and singles out to a rhythm almost its own, again, anticipating design.
But never any of us physiologist or fisherman or I quite makes sense of it. We find our own level
as prairie, auburn or snow-streaming, sounds forever the almost limitless.
The following are links to other Web sites with information about poet Margaret Avison. (Note: All links to external Web sites open in a new browser window.)
