The Jury Deliberates:

Alex: Well, as we sit around the table here trying to decide a winner it looks like there won't be any real dogfights. I thought The Burning Eaves and Robinson's Crossing were the class of the field. The Memory Orchard was a good book, but a bit uneven. I couldn't get into Disarmament (though I would give Gaspereau Press a special award). Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida I didn't like. All for reasons already canvassed. What about you?

Zach: I thought the two strongest candidates were Manicom and Bowling. In spite of the latter's lapses, I found his best poems more powerful than Manicom's - though this is one of those odious comparisons made necessary by our mandate to choose a winner. Personally, I don't judge a poet by their clinkers, but by their best poems. Using those criteria, I'd back Bowling for this prize, only slightly ahead of Manicom. But this is a prize for best book, isn't it, and Bowling's book has a lot of slack in it, which cannot be said of Manicom's. At 40, Bowling now has six collections of verse and two novels under his belt. He might just be one of those poets whose real ability will only be apparent in a carefully selected edition, but one hopes that in future he pays more attention to the line and the poem than to the book as unit of production. He'll be a powerhouse if he does. As for the rest of the crowd, Zwicky occasionally impressed me, but not often enough and not strongly enough. Terpstra I wanted to like, and did occasionally, but as Steven said, he has a bad habit of pulling the rug out from under his own best writing. And like Alex, I didn't think much of Borson's book at all.

Steven: Seems there's not much contention in the favourites. I found David Manicom's book to be the most profitable, least exhaustible mine of ideas, emotion, word-play and just plain excitement of all the contenders. Where Jan Zwicky seems to avoid figures of speech (confining us to a very grounded level of reality), and Tim Bowling's risks sometimes became their own purpose (forceful, novel, and propelling as they often were), I found Manicom's precision, sense of play, and care not just in craftsmanship but in the art itself to be the most satisfying of these books. Someone once said that poetry begins with a failure of nerve. If it's true, it's been interesting to see how each of these writers answered to it. I found The Burning Eaves to be the only collection that, almost entirely, and entirely through its poetry, was able to transform that failure into a poetry that keeps responding in all kinds of ways each time I read it. 

So yes, my vote is for The Burning Eaves.

Alex: I guess the prize will go to Manicom then. Despite the difficulties with Oolichan. I guess I should mention the actual decision made by the Governor-General's panel. They had this to say about the winner:

These poems invite the reader to embark upon a contemplative journey full of imaginative encounters with death, love, beauty, creativity and the mystery of the physical world. This beautifully-crafted book is an organic whole that resonates on profound spiritual levels, juxtaposing the mundane with notions of transcendence.

What a load of shit. You could throw blather like this at any of the shortlisted books and it wouldn't make any difference. In this case they're talking about Roo Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida, which took home the prize.

Looks like that wraps things up.

Zach: I'd like to think that any more-or-less impartial jury, given these five books, would've come to the same conclusion we did. Hard to say what the "real" jury went through, but as I suggested in my Maisonneuve column, there were certainly a lot of personal connections between jurors and nominees. I think even the fact that Terpstra and Bringhurst had books out with the same press in the same year is questionable; I just wrote a review for the Quill and Quire and this kind of relationship is spelled out in their conflict of interest guidelines - for writing a 350-word review! One would think it should be stricter for doling out a prize worth $15K and a much-enlarged readership. So that's 3 blatant conflicts for Bringhurst and one for Thornton, the dedicatee of The Memory Orchard. Not a good score. Long live the transparent jury!