Kingston poet Sadiqa de Meijer has been named the winner of the 2012 Canada Writes CBC Poetry Prize for her submission, "Great Aunt Unmarried".
Canada Writes announced Sadiqa's victory this morning with the following blurb from the jury of Julie Bruck, Patrick Lane and Dennis Lee:
“With telling and resonant detail, "Great Aunt Unmarried" evokes the relationship between its speaker and three elderly aunts. ‘We went for a drive in nature. Two of them tied ivory / kerchiefs around their home permanents, while the third / muttered a curse on vanity, and we folded into a sedan …’ The sequence speaks in a deceptively quiet voice, with an assurance which catches the poignancy of these maiden ladies’ lives. Both tender and funny, the poems fulfill Octavio Paz’s demand of poetry — they ‘resurrect presences’.”
Sadiqa will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, and “Great Aunt Unmarried” will be published in the October edition of enRoute magazine and on the Canada Writes website. She will also receive a two-week residency at The Banff Centre’s Leighton Artists’ Colony.
The other finalists for the prize were:
Stephanie Bolster for “Long Exposure”
Catherine Greenwood for “The Texada Queen”
Emily McGiffin for “Stikine Country”
Marion Quednau for “Yesterday, I looked inside”
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