No Canadians made the short list for the Griffin Poetry Prize, an august Canadian literary award that had separate purses for homegrown and international talent before 2023. The five nominees for the $130,000 prize include four U.S. writers and one German.
Carl Phillips, of Cape Cod, Mass., is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet nominated for Scattered Snows, to the North, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The jury cited Phillips’s articulation of love “in all its assertions and disguises – calibrated in all its doubt, tenderness, forms of desire, loyalty, solitudes.” Phillips was shortlisted for the Griffin in 2014.
Another former Pulitzer winner, Michigan’s Diane Seuss, was picked for Modern Poetry, published by Graywolf Press. The judges described her as an “indispensable poet” whose shortlisted work is the “culmination of a life spent learning the art, of locating the beauty of drawing near.” Seuss received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020 and the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021.
The jury was comprised of Northern Irish poet, novelist and critic Nick Laird, Polish poet and translator Tomasz Różycki and Toronto poet and novelist Anne Michaels, winner of last year’s Giller Prize for the novel Held. They each read 578 books of poetry, including 47 translations from 20 languages, submitted by 219 publishers from 17 different countries.
Three of this year’s shortlisted Griffin works were translations, including The Great Zoo, translated by Aaron Coleman and published by the University of Chicago Press. It was originally written in Spanish by the great Cuban poet, journalist, and activist Nicolás Guillén, who died in 1989.
The Great Zoo, published in 1967, is considered one of the masterpieces of Latin American poetry. Of the English translation, the judges noted Coleman’s “subtle understanding of the contexts of colonial oppression and exoticism.”
Virginia-based poet Brian Henry was shortlisted for Kiss the Eyes of Peace, a translation of poems written by Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, a leader of the Eastern European avant-garde who died in 2014. Published by Minneapolis’s Milkweed Editions, Kiss the Eyes of Peace covers Šalamun’s entire body of work.
“Presented by Henry with precision and power,” the jury wrote in its citation, “the English reader experiences this poetry at its finest, with its characteristic post-Dada, unlimited freedom, and a peculiar and unmistakable lightness of diction. ”
The final nominated writer is Karen Leeder, a writer, scholar, and translator of contemporary German literature. Psyche Running is an overview of the work by the celebrated German poet Durs Grünbein, whose Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems, translated by Michael Hoffmann, was shortlisted for the Griffin in 2006.
The jury cited adept translations by Leeder that established a new version of Grünbein in English that was “universal, lyrical, philosophical.”
Each of the shortlisters will read from their books at Toronto’s Koerner Hall on June 4, when the winner will be announced. Last year’s Griffin winner was George McWhirter, the son of a shipyard worker and Vancouver’s first poet laureate.
