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Antigonish Review
# 135
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The
Third Annual
Great Blue Heron
Poetry Contest
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The several hundred entries we received in this year's poetry contest
attest to the continuing vitality of poetry in Canada and abroad. Two
rounds of thanks are in order. We are very grateful to our judges for
2003: Peter Sanger, Mitch Parry, and Eleonore Schonmaier. Entries were
blind-judged, as in previous years. Peter, Mitch, and Eleonore coordinated
readings of manuscripts and conference calls in a professional, collegial
and timely manner.
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Thanks, too, to everyone who entered the contest; without you, the poetic
blue heron could not take flight at all.
This year's winning poem is "Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes"
by Stephanie Bolster. "Ménagerie" is a complex and ambitious
meditation on place and memory. Bolster sets the idealized discourse of
travel guidebooks against a darker vision of history in her exploration
of landscapes both foreign and closer to home. She exposes the violence
beneath the aestheticized surface we, as tourists, are so often seduced
by. Bolster's poem is full of cages, images of containment. In her dreamlike
sequence, humans, as well as animals, are caged: "Elephants escaped
to office cubicles… . " She reminds us that we are caged by our own
history of violence: "This is no zoo, it's a spot a bomb fell."
The 'untroubled' tourist experience, in Bolster, is continually challenged
by a third dimension, a haunted presence of "things untranslatable."
Bolster's poem resonates with our post 9/11 world: "There are no/safe
enclosures." She has depicted a powerful post-apocalyptic vision
that qualifies, with striking irony, the clichés of travel.
Catherine Greenwood's second-prize poem, "Kai Awase: The Shell Game,"
pivots, as well, around the idea of journey or travel. Greenwood takes
us into an exotic world of stories, of "white moons" "star-drowning
dark," and "coral polypidoms." Her poem's main figure is
Persephone-like, an occupant of a liminal zone, a space between: "How
can one know/which is heaven, which earth? The horizon/floats unanchored
between two blues, no boat/or bird in the foreground to pin it down."
Greenwood's watery landscape of dragons and doubled images evokes a unique
mythological perspective bound up in sensuous layers of story.
Michael Trussler's third-prize entry, "The Blue Ball," constructs
a gaze as sharp and unwavering as a camera eye. Trussler's "prairie/lawn"
on which the small boy plays "firefighter" in "primary
colours" emerges with crystal clarity yet, paradoxically, with the
numinous quality of a mirage. Through powerful imagery, Trussler's photographic
poem renders the "thickening world" and we, as humans, its "unguarded
skin…its/rainy breath." The illusion of solidity, of capturing the
world on film, is exposed. Trussler's poem, "Her Front Yard,"
is equally clear-eyed in its celebration of the kind of lawn kitsch we've
all seen: wishing wells, leprechauns, vampires and "several Santa/Clauses."
The poem's surprising turn comes when the woman who owns the lawn becomes
part of her own surreal stage - but we won't spoil the ending for you.
The above comments are mere snapshots. We invite you to luxuriate more
fully in these poems, published in this issue of TAR (#135), and
to see the posting for our 2004 Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest, also
in this issue!
Thanks again to our judges, and to all who participated in this year's
competition.
B. Allan Quigley & Jeanette Lynes
Editors
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