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.
John Steffler, Griffin Poetry Prize 2011 Canadian Shortlist
John Steffler was the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada from 2006 to 2008. His previous books of poetry include The Grey Islands, That Night We Were Ravenous, winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize, and Helix: New and Selected Poems, winner of the Newfoundland and Labrador Poetry Prize. Steffler is also the author of the award-winning novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright.
Judges’ Citation
“The playful spontaneity that enlivens John Steffler’s Lookout moves through the poems like wind, revealing both their flexibility and their sturdiness. With a passionate naturalist’s trained and ever-curious eye, Steffler is interested in what happens both in and out of sight. In language that ranges from affable story-telling to tough, spare, startling lyrics, he probes the complex collisions between Nature and humankind without inflicting upon his subject any of the ecological ranting, self-dramatizing grief, or faux-mysticism that infects so much contemporary ‘nature poetry.’ Modest, plainspoken, and unsentimental in stance, his poems are at the same time untethered to the literal, which allows for sudden and unnerving swerves, poems that decisively and unpredictably break the membrane between realms, as when a vole with ‘a laugh like a snowplow’s blade’ begins to speak, or rifts appear in a loved one’s memory, allowing reality and fantasy, past and present, to dissolve into one another. Steffler’s quality of attention is so fierce and so assured that we trust it to lead us into new and often unsettling territory. In Lookout, his masterful inter-leaving of physical, philosophical, and psychological worlds entices us into a dream of wakefulness we recognize as our own.”
Summary
The poems in John Steffler’s new collection are enlivened by the same muscular acts of attention that characterize his earlier books. As always, his poems inhabit experience fully, senses on high alert, transmitting the abundance and turbulence of physical existence; they are charged with the raw Eros of being. Nowhere – not in Canada nor in the world at large – is there a more complete nature poet: attuned, robust, honest, fully informal, and emotionally candid, brimming with energy and animal spirits.
Note: Summaries are taken from promotional materials supplied by the publisher, unless otherwise noted.
John Steffler reads Beating the Bounds
Beating the Bounds, by John Steffler
Beating the Bounds
When I was six years old, my parents, along with other adults who’d never spoken to me, came laughing and acting silly, picking me up, giggling, “Now we’ll show you a house you didn’t know about.” “A big house.” “A secret house you knew about all the time.” So I was frightened, seeing how serious it was that they were so strange, although I was probably smiling, and they carried me and other children my age to the river and said, “Here is the marble floor,” and put my bare legs in the fast place between stones and it was colder than I remembered it and the tugging of dark cold water became my legs, the Fox Island River became my legs – afterwards when I was falling asleep or sometimes just walking along, the bottom of me would be moving away like that – and they carried me, tickling me, singing ridiculous songs among rough brown stones up a valley past caribou where it was cold and held me up on top of their palms so I faced the sky and someone with fat fingers that smelled of sheep held my eyes open until the cold air and white sky burned and were too bright and my eyes brimmed like two cuts and I felt those cuts go right into my name and they said, “This is the roof up here, you can’t go higher than this,” and that wind and sky were my eyes then, they were in my name, and the people pushed me through a patch of alders and a patch of spruce the wind had bent, saying, “Here’s a young cub we’ll take home and raise,” and “Push him in front so we won’t get scratched,” and my skin was crisscrossed with cuts, so I felt those branches, smelled the alder musk, the sharp edge of spruce like a coast, a burning fringe, a noise around me holding me in and they said, “This is the west wall of the house you live in, remember it,” and the day went on like that, they pushed me against a cliff to the north so I felt its jaggedness in my spine, they sat me in black soupy peat and said, “Here is your bed, it is nighttime,” they took me down to the sea and made me drink it and told me that was the south and the kitchen, “the garden,” someone laughed and give me a capelin to eat, rubbed scales on my face, the backs of my hands and “Over there,” they said, meaning over the hills across the gulf, “that is not your house and the people who live there are strangers to you, not enemies if you deal with them properly.” “They speak a language of farts,” someone said, “they gobble like turkeys when they fuck,” and although my body was made of all it had touched that day and my ears were full of my parents’ voices and the voices of their friends, in my heart I was still frightened and felt like a stranger among them.
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