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Judging a literary contest is a source of pleasure and anguish - in equal measure, though in retrospect it's always the pleasure that remains. The pleasure, of course, arises from the poetry; in this case, we read over three hundred anonymous submissions, many of them powerfully written. The box made the rounds from Nova Scotia to Québec and back, and in each locale the recipient sat with a stack of poetry and enjoyed. The anguish set in when it came time to choose just a few; still more challenging was ranking those we'd each chosen and, finally, discussing our rankings and making the final choice of first, second, and third prize. Fortunately, there was common ground among us, and we're all pleased with, and proud of, the winning work. Our thanks to all who submitted, and our congratulations to the winners, for creating poetry that stood out.

What did we look for? A submission in which the whole was greater than the sum of its parts - a quality that all three winners amply demonstrate - and in which the intellect and the emotions were both engaged. Emily Dickinson believed that, "If I feel physically as though the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." Each of these winning submissions did just that, surprising us with its insights, its formal risks, or its inimitable music. When it came right down to it, we favoured ambition over formal perfection, rough edges over tidiness. We were looking for something beyond technical proficiency - that duende that is so difficult to analyze, though we all know it when we see it.

In "Cape Breton Relative," Anita Lahey has written a vigorous series of poems, undeniably oral, bound in the gritty reality of her chosen territory and delivered by living, authentic voices. The art all happens behind the scenes; what we see here is bold and bawdy, and, despite its insistent thread of grief, often very funny. The reader-as-interlocutor becomes a character, as does the writer, who is at times merely a mouthpiece or note-taker and at others a participant who has "held / the tar, rubbed its sheen." Lahey modulates the syntax to carry us from the chattiness with which the first poem begins to the lyric commentary with which the selection concludes. Local history is mythologized, then turned on its head. The titles invoke the adventures of Victorian children's books, their formality delightfully at odds with the destinations (the pop machine by the wharf, the tar ponds). The tension that arises between the titles and the down to earth subjects, between the tight visual box of the stanza and the heavily enjambed lines within, between the rhyme scheme of "In Which You Learn, Once and For All, About Fishermen" and the colloquial grammar, gives the series a bursting energy - one senses that the attempt to confine this world artistically is not entirely possible. And yet how marvellous Lahey's rendering of that impossibility.

David Hickey's "River Liberties" also takes on the vast and nebulous, this time from a cosmic perspective. The series, a crown of free-verse sonnets, uses that form's refrains to harness a meandering meditation on the physical and metaphysical. One can argue that all poetry is about one's place in the universe, but few poets dare to address the question so literally - and yet so abstractly. Shunning Pound's famous admonishment, "Go in fear of abstractions," this poem makes of abstractions such distinctive, tactile creations as "perforated anger." As the metaphors evolve, keeping the lines aloft, so does the speaker's self-deprecation lift the poem above the philosophical mire into which the subject could have fallen. Unlike a traditional crown, the series does not end with its first line but with a line that rhymes with it, suggesting that the circle is less meaningful a trajectory than, perhaps, a spiral. If the speaker does not attain the communion with nature that he seeks, he seems reconciled to the old wisdom that the journey is the destination - a wisdom the river, and indeed the universe itself, have imparted.

The speaker of Kate Hall's "Schrödinger's Cat" series is caught in an epistemological and metaphysical crisis, yet cognizant enough of her situation to playfully mock it. Much of the appeal here is in the stream-of-consciousness directness: the speaker is at once obsessed by timeless questions and easily distracted; insistent on answers yet impatient with such preoccupations when there are such matters as lost toothbrushes, insomnia, and self-harm to contend with. The plainness of the language, syntax, and lineation creates exhilarating leaps between sentences: "There is a cat outside my front door. / Sometimes I have a headache and I wonder where it's from. / It could be a tumour." The juxtaposition between the poem's intellectual ambitions and its humble style evoke the nerve-jangled existence of one - anyone - who urgently seeks to understand the impossible. As in all of the three winners, the speaker's solace lies in the act of art-making, in which, "Briefly, everything is not a weight in hand but airborne."