GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE 2003

Canadian Shortlist

Book: thirsty
Poet: Dionne Brand
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

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Biography

Dionne Brand won the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry and the Trillium Award for Literature in 1997 for Land to Light On, her seventh book of poetry. Her fiction includes the acclaimed novels In Another Place Not Here and At the Full Change of the Moon as well as Sans Souci and Other Stories. Her most recent non-fiction book, A Map to the Door of No Return, was published by Doubleday Canada. Her Griffin-shortlisted book of poetry, thirsty, has won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets and is also nominated for the Trillium Book Award. Her newest novel, What We All Long For, was released to critical acclaim in early 2005, and won the 2006 City of Toronto Book Award. Brand was recently recognized with the $10,000 (Cdn) Harbourfront Festival Prize, which honours an individual who has made a significant contribution to the Canadian literary community. Her most recent book of poetry, Inventory, was nominated for the 2006 Governor-General's Award for Poetry and is shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award.

In September, 2009, Brand was named the poet laureate of Toronto for a three-year term.

Judges’ Citation

“The word ‘thirsty’ in Dionne Brand’s long poem is a dying man’s last utterance. Shot by the police in his own front yard, Alan is a Christie Pits Jeremiah as well as a tender nurturer of plants, an immigrant and a dreamer who thirsts for ‘a calming loving spot’ among the ‘conditional places’ and ‘conditional sentences’ that perpetuate the marginalisation of the poor. Thirsty is a reckoning with the pretenses of community in the soul-withering environments of today’s mega-cities. But Brand’s luscious and ferocious lines go beyond a critique of dystopian realities to construct, in themselves, in their keen, lyric intelligence, an oasis of truth, compassion, and sensuality.”

From thirsty

I This city is beauty unbreakable and amorous as eyelids, in the streets, pressed with fierce departures, submerged landings, I am innocent as thresholds and smashed night birds, lovesick, as empty elevators let me declare doorways, corners, pursuit, let me say standing here in eyelashes, in invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake in the tiny shops of untrue recollections, the brittle, gnawed life we live, I am held, and held the touch of everything blushes me, pigeons and wrecked boys, half-dead hours, blind musicians, inconclusive women in bruised dresses even the habitual grey-suited men with terrible briefcases, how come, how come I anticipate nothing as intimate as history would I have had a different life failing this embrace with broken things, iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks in the brain, would I know these particular facts, how a phrase scars a cheek, how water dries love out, this, a thought as casual as any second eviscerates a breath and this, we meet in careless intervals, in coffee bars, gas stations, in prosthetic conversations, lotteries, untranslatable mouths, in versions of what we may be, a tremor of the hand in the realization of endings, a glancing blow of tears on skin, the keen dismissal in speed From thirsty, by Dionne Brand Copyright © Dionne Brand, 2002

Listen to Dionne Brand read from thirsty Click below to view and hear the reading. (Running time: 2:44 minutes) Windows Media ~4.4 Mb RealMedia ~4.5 Mb MP3 ~1.3 Mb We recommend running these audio and video selections on a high speed Internet connection.

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More about Dionne Brand

The following are links to other Web sites with information about poet Dionne Brand. (Note: All links to external Web sites open in a new browser window.)

• Opening the Door - Interview with Dionne Brand in Read Magazine

• Dionne Brand bio, works, etc. on Canadian Poetry Web site

• Northwest Passages profile of Dionne Brand

• University of Minnesota - Voices from the Gap profile of Dionne Brand

• Dionne Brand’s thirsty wins Pat Lowther Memorial Award
  (League of Canadian Poets press release)

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Photo credit: Neil Graham