THE GRIFFIN TRUST For Excellence In

Trustees: Press Release Carolyn Forché THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE ANNOUNCES THE 2005 Scott Griffin CANADIAN AND INTERNATIONAL SHORTLIST Griffin Poetry Prize Award increased to C$100,000 Robin Robertson Two winning poets to accompany the Griffin Poetry Prize team to Ireland to appear at the Dublin Writers Festival David Young

TORONTO, April 6th — The Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist for 2005 was announced today by Scott Griffin, and David Young, Trustees of The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry. The C$100,000 Griffin Poetry Prize (increased this year from C$80,000) is the most lucrative prize to accept books of poetry from any country in the world – exemplifying the international spirit of poetry. The prize is awarded annually for the two best books of poetry (including translations) published in English the previous year.

A record-breaking 433 eligible books from 17 different countries, translated from 8 different languages, were submitted for 2005. The seven finalists – three Canadian and four International – will be invited to read in Toronto at the MacMillan Theatre on June 1st. The winners, who each receive C$50,000, will be announced on June 2nd at the fifth Griffin Poetry Prize awards event.

The Canadian Shortlist

Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida • Roo Borson McClelland and Stewart Ltd.

Changing on the Fly • George Bowering Polestar/Raincoast Books

Camber • Don McKay McClelland and Stewart Ltd.

The International Shortlist

On the Ground • Fanny Howe Graywolf Press

Corpus • Michael Symmons Roberts Jonathan Cape

A Green Light • Matthew Rohrer Verse Press

Selected Poems 1963-2003 • Faber and Faber

THE GRIFFIN TRUST For Excellence In Poetry

The judges for 2005 are the distinguished poets (United Kingdom), Erin Moure (Canada) and Tomaz Salamun (Slovenia).

Moure was short listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002 and is the editor of the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology, a selection of poems from the short listed books, published by Inc. Royalties from the Anthology are donated to UNESCO’s World Poetry Day.

Following the Awards, the Canadian and International winners will accompany a Griffin team – including Carolyn Forché, Scott Griffin, Robin Robertson, David Young, Leslie Greentree, David Kirby and Gerald Stern – to Ireland to participate in readings and celebrations for the 2005 Dublin Writers Festival on June 16th and 17th. The trip to Dublin is part of the vision Scott Griffin sees for bringing the Griffin Poetry Prize and prize winners to an increasingly international audience.

The Griffin Poetry Prize was launched in September, 2000 by Trustees Margaret Atwood, Scott Griffin, Robert Hass, Michael Ondaatje, Robin Robertson and David Young. Most recently, Carolyn Forché has joined the group of Trustees who each year selected the judges for the Griffin Poetry Prize.

The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry was created to serve and encourage poetry written in English anywhere in the world. Eligible collections of poetry, including translations, must be submitted by publishers in the calendar year of their publication.

Tickets for the Readings to be held on June 1st at the MacMillan Theatre are available at www.griffinpoetryprize.com/tickets or by calling 905 565 5993. - 30 -

THE GRIFFIN TRUST For Excellence In Poetry

NOTE: The publishers mentioned in our release are those who submitted the books.

NOTE TO BOOKSELLERS: Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist bookmarks, posters and stickers are supplied free of charge by The Griffin Trust. To view these items and access the order form, visit our Web site, at http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/order.php. Winner stickers will be available after June 2nd.

Please direct other inquiries as follows: Press and Publicity: General Inquiries: Jane Wilson, Publicity Director Ruth Smith, Manager Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected]

Links: Submitting Publishers’ Web sites: Graywolf Press – http://www.graywolfpress.org Jonathan Cape – http://www.randomhouse.co.uk Polestar/Raincoast Books – http://www.raincoast.com Faber and Faber – http://www.faber.co.uk Verse Press – http://www.versepress.org McClelland and Stewart Ltd. - http://www.mcclelland.com/

Marketing Collateral http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/order.php

Downloadable photographs of 2005 short listed poets http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/presskit.php

THE GRIFFIN TRUST For Excellence In Poetry

THE 2005 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE SHORTLIST CITATIONS AND BIOGRAPHIES

The Canadian Shortlist

Book: Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida Poet: Roo Borson Publisher: McClelland and Stewart Ltd.

Citation: “To lose “North”, in some idioms, is to lose all direction. In her journey, Borson finds North. This is the work of a poet writing at the height of her powers. It is a poetic journal of mortality, of the “why be born?” and “do you still love poetry?”, of entering middle age, and of journeying through landscape, seasons, plants, pasts, to find it again. The book is a small perfection in its construction, moving deftly through seasons and forms: poetic prose for a garden of persimmons, haiku rising out of prose sequences for the autumn record, and the book’s fulcrum, the “Water Colour” poems, not haiku but poems that bear haiku’s arrested feeling and succinct observation. As for Basho, Borson’s mentor and poetic ancestor, setting off toward North – lost, loss, losing – is to find the journey itself and one’s own corporeality, out of grief and into the light of words.”

Biography: Born in California in 1952, Roo Borson has made her home in Canada since graduating with a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of British Columbia in 1977. Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida, also nominated recently for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and shortlisted for the Trillium Book Prize, is her tenth book of poems, which include Water memory (1996) and Night Walk: Selected Poems (1994), a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. In addition to her prize winning essays, Borson’s poetry has won many awards including the CBC Prize for Poetry in 1982 and 1989, and has been a finalist for the National Magazine Awards in 1990 and 1993, the Governor General’s Award in 1984 as well as 1994, and in collaboration with Kim Maltman and Andy Patton as PAIN NOT BREAD, won the Long Poem Prize in the Malahat Review in 1993. Among her publications are: In the Smokey Light of the Fields (1980), Intent, Or, the Weight of the World (1989), Landfall (1977), Rain (1980), A Sad Device (1981), The Transparence of November; Snow (1985) and The Whole Night Coming Home (1984). Borson has given readings across Canada, in the United States and in Australia, and has been published in a wide array of anthologies including The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, the Norton Introduction to Poetry, the Norton Introduction to Literature and The Morningside Papers. She has served as the Writer in residence at both Concordia and the University of Western Ontario. Currently living in Toronto with poet and physicist Kim Maltman, along with Andy Patton and Maltman, Borson is a member of the Collaborative performance poetry ensemble PAIN NOT BREAD.

The 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist Citations and Biographies 1

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Book: Changing on the Fly Poet: George Bowering Publisher: Polestar/Raincoast Books

Citation: “In George Bowering’s flight changes, lyric takes to the air – with spareness, resiliency and irrepressible humour. This collection from 40 years of playful seriousness extends lyric form in a marvellous variety of ways, condensing a remarkable agility, an exuberance in the singular voice and in feelings’ construct and presentation. It is irreverent, yet leaves us in the hush of reverence. Bowering’s voice is instantly recognisable throughout, in all its variants, its pulling of high into “low” culture, its borrowings from older poetries we all know. Bowering is the poet of delight in earthly matters, of bemusement at the self. His lyrics turn out the streetlights (who needs them!) and light up the stars. And his lines try to understand what it is to exist, in the face of fears we all have, “fears that I may cease to be.”

Biography: In recognition of his extraordinary accomplishments, George Bowering was named Canada’s First Poet Laureate in 2000. The much lauded Officer of the Order of Canada has won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1969, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1980, the Nichol Chapbook Award for Poetry in both 1991 and 1992, the Canadian Author’s Association Award for Poetry in 1993 and was awarded an Honorary Degree (D. Litt.) from the University of British Columbia in 1994. A list of his collections of poems include: Sticks and Stones (1963), Points on the Grid (1963), The Man in Yellow Boots (1964), The Silver Wire (1966), Rocky Mountain Foot (1969), The Gangs of Kosmos (1969), Touch: Selected Poems (1960- 1969), In the Flesh (1974), The Catch (1976), Poem and Other Baseballs (1976), The Concrete Island (1977), Another Mouth (1979), Particular Accidents (1981), West Window (1982), Smoking Mirror (1982), Seventy-One Poems for People (1985), Delayed Mercy and Other Poems (1986), Sticks and Stones (1989), Urban Snow (1992), George Bowering Selected Poems 1961-1992 (1993), Blonds on Bikes (1997), Poems et Autre Baseballs – Collaboration (1999). Born in Penticton British Columbia in 1935, George Bowering has had a multi-faceted career as novelist, editor, radio personality, professor and poet. After serving as an aerial photographer in the RCAF, he attended the University of British Columbia where he earned a BA in History and an MA in English, and took part in establishing the post modernist, avant-garde movement in BC by co- founding and co-editing TISH. Bowering has taught at the University of Calgary, the University of Western Ontario and now teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He is one of Canada’s most prolific writers of poetry, short stories and novels with more than 40 titles to his credit. Bowering won the 1969 Governor General’s Literary Award in the poetry category for his works The Gangs of Cosmos and Rocky Mountain Foot. He also won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1980 for his novel Burning Water.

The 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist Citations and Biographies 2

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Book: Camber Poet: Don McKay Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Citation: “Music is a word often associated with McKay’s poetry, and this selection of work covering three decades is a triumph of lyricism and linguistic orchestration. McKay displays an extraordinary capacity for submitting to and revelling in the musical phrases and cadences of language while never coming loose from meaning and sense. So simultaneously his poems succeed at both the intellectual and the instinctive level. He is an essential poet of our time in as much as he describes our deep, complex and vital relationship with the planet, a relationship which seems so close to breakdown. His gift, it seems, is as natural and as the living world he so frequently chooses to write of, and his poems as airborne and acrobatic as the birds which populate the vast skies and landscapes of his imagination.”

Biography: Don McKay has published nine books of poetry including Birding, Or Desire (1983), Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night (1987), Night Field (1991), Apparatus (1997) and Another Gravity (2000). McKay has won two Governor General’s Awards for Poetry (in 1991 and 2000), a National Magazine Award in 1991, the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Poetry in 1983, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry (also in 1983) and was shortlisted for the Inaugural Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001. Born in Owen Sound in 1942, McKay is known as a poet, as an editor and as a creative writing teacher. He has taught at the University of Western Ontario, the University of New Brunswick, The Banff Centre, the Sage Hill Writing Experience, and the BC Festival of the Arts. He has served as editor and publisher of Brick Books, and from 1991 to 1996 he edited Fiddlehead magazine. He presently lives in British Columbia.

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The International Shortlist

Book: On the Ground Poet: Fanny Howe Publisher: Graywolf Press

Citation: “These are startling, beautiful, challenging poems that work within the troubled and chafed borders and interfacings between spirit and material world to ask that basic question: how can we live? How can we be ordinary with each other (so necessary) in these times of war and political terror that try to keep our lives in a “state of exception” that seems to justify cruelty? Howe’s poems are firmly on the ground but not grounded; they use lyric energy and phrasings in new ways that are deft, open, and have synaptic intelligence. Here, poetic transport is not transcendent, not consolation; it is earth-bound, immediate and enamoured. This is a book that teaches us to be ecstatic about poetry; in it we hear the frayed and difficult passages of our thought and place as humans, our restive worry and our longing for peaceful cohabitation with all others. On the Ground is an essential book for our times.”

Biography: Fanny Howe is the author of over twenty books of poetry and prose including Gone: Poems (2003), Selected Poems (2000), Forged (1999), One Crossed Out (1997), O’Clock (1995), The End (1992), For Erato; The Meaning of Life (1984), Alsace-Lorraine (1982) and Poem from a Single Pallet (1980). The recipient of the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Selected Poems (2000), she has also won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts and the Village Voice, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacArthur Colony. Howe was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001. Born in Buffalo in 1940, Howe is a prolific poet, novelist and essayist who has won multiple awards for her collections of poetry and novels for young adults. A creative writing teacher of note, Howe has lectured at , Emerson College, , and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is Professor Emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. .

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Book: Corpus Poet: Michael Symmons Roberts Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Citation: “There is a patient, almost forensic methodology in the poems of Michael Symmons Roberts, a systematic building up or stripping away of layers, until the subject and the sense of each poem is either established or exposed. This collection, Corpus, is almost a poetic autopsy, an investigation of the body, sometimes for signs of life and sometimes for what might loosely be called the human spirit. But if this is poetry in the religious tradition, there is nothing mystical or superstitious about Corpus. Just to dare to consider such a concept as the soul, the poet must explore wildly differing aspects of human behaviour, from gross acts of torture to moments of ecstatic love; with a photographic accuracy and frame by frame, almost documentary observations, his eye is unflinching. Knowing but never sagacious, confident but never preachy or dogmatic, this is Symmons Roberts at his most readable, most lyrical best.”

Biography: Corpus (2004) is the most recently published book of poetry from Michael Symmons Roberts. He has authored three previous published books of poetry: Soft Keys (1993), Raising Sparks (1999) and Burning Babylon (2001). Corpus was shortlisted for the 2004 Forward Prize for Best Collection and the 2004 T.S. Eliot Prize, and has already won the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award; this is his first entry onto the shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Born in Preston Lancashire in 1963, Roberts is also an award-winning radio writer, a documentary filmmaker for the BBC, and a frequent collaborator with the composer James MacMillan.

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THE GRIFFIN TRUST For Excellence In Poetry

Book: A Green Light Poet: Matthew Rohrer Publisher: Verse Press

Citation: “With jumpy verve, Rohrer’s green-lit poems lay bare an anxiety of influence, social and linguistic, and present us the sideways view of the world of a young American not able to assume the mantle of hero, not able to be “the adorable boy”. In the midst of what could be, in other hands, wreckage or hopelessness, Rohrer’s poems run up the banner of hopefulness, create complete poems out of incomplete thoughts. Rohrer has an enchanting willingness to look outward, a willingness not to grasp the world using old means which have failed us, even if no new means present themselves ready-made – no wonder jumpiness is in our very condition. There is, too, a current of sadness that his lines and words buck even as they convey; yet the grief they carry does not bear us downward. This is a book with an edge, a book of brash clamour and hard-earned joy.”

Biography: Matthew Rohrer’s most recently published work is A Green Light (2004) the book for which he has been named to the International shortlist for this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize. He is the author of A Hummock in the Malookas (1994) the winner of the National Poetry Series, and Satellite (2001), Nice Hat. Thanks. (2002, with Joshua Beckman), and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (2003, also with Joshua Beckman). Rohrer has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered – The Book Show, and his poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies and have been translated into Slovenian, Finnish and Portuguese. Born in Ann Arbor, , and raised in Oklahoma, Rohrer won a Hopwood Award for Poetry and a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Poetry while at the . Presently living in Brooklyn, New York, Rohrer is the Poetry Editor for Fence.

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THE GRIFFIN TRUST For Excellence In Poetry

Book: Selected Poems 1963-2003 Poet: Charles Simic Publisher: Faber and Faber

Citation: “Simic is something of a magician, a conjuror. Out of nothing it seems, out of thin air, the poems appear before our eyes. One apparently casual observation leads to another, and suddenly, exponentially, we are spellbound. It is a trick many have tried to imitate but few have achieved. At the centre of Simic’s art is a disarming, deadpan precision, which should never be mistaken for simplicity. Everything appears pared back to the solid and the essential, and it is this economy of vocabulary and clarity of diction which have made his poetry so portable and so influential wherever it is published. Simic is one of the few poets of our time to achieve both critical and popular acclaim; he is genuinely quotable, and it is entirely possible that some of his phrases and lines will lodge in the common memory. Without any hint of loftiness, then, and from a position which is entirely his own, Simic manages to speak to the many and not just the few.”

Biography: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic has published five books of essays, a memoir, numerous translations and sixteen collections of poetry. Born in 1938 in Belgrade Yugoslavia, Simic immigrated to the United States in 1952 and saw his first poems published in 1959. In 1961 he was drafted into the US Army and in 1966 earned his Bachelor’s degree at , publishing his first full-length collection of poems What the Grass Says in 1967. Since then he has published more than 60 books in the United States including Jackstraws (Notable Book of the Year in the New York Times 1999), Walking the Black Cat (finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry 1996), A Wedding in Hell (1994), Hotel Insomnia (1992), The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (for which he received the Pulitzer for Poetry in 1990), Selected Poems: 1963 – 1983 (1990), and Unending Blues (1986). He has also published many translations of French, Serbian, Croatian and Macedonian and Slovenian poetry and has twice won the Pen International Translation Award. Amongst his many accomplishments and accolades, Simic was the Guest Editor of The Best 1992 was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000 and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 1973, Simic has lived in New Hampshire where he is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.

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