:: Descant is pleased to announce the winner of the 2009 Winston Collins/ Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem

TORONTO — February 21, 2009
For Immediate Release

:: Poet Marilyn Gear Pilling is the winner of the 2009 Winston Collins/Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem. The $1,000 prize recognizing excellence in Canadian poetry was presented to Pilling on Feb 20 by Descant Editor-in-Chief Karen Mulhallen at a celebratory reception at PageWave Graphics, in Toronto.

The Collins Prize commemorates the memory of Winston Collins, writer and enthusiastic teacher of literature at the universities of Cincinnati, Princeton and Toronto. The annual prize perpetuates his remarkable talent for encouraging self-expression through writing.

The judges for this year’s award — Nora Kelly and Eric Wright — were struck by Pilling's winning poem “Billy Collins Interviewed On Stage at Chautauqua”, and praised it for its comic maturity. “Here, there is comedy in the detail: zinging precision of language, little IEDs lying in wait for the reader. There is also comedy of shape. The poem swells like a child’s balloon, filling with the poet’s rage until it reaches maximum size with the superbly inflated phrase, ‘riding the currents of institutionalized sublimity’. Then the poet lets go, and the balloon goes flying through room, collapsing with a rude noise as Collins leaves the stage.”

Also recognized at Friday’s announcement were Fredericton poet M. Travis Lane, and Guelph’s Shane Neilson, who each received Collins Prize Honourable Mentions and $250 awards.

In Shane Neilson’s poem “Naming Uncle Bridges’ Farms,” the measurement of time skillfully shifts from the concrete and familial to the abstract and concrete. The judges were impressed by how Neilson “laments loss but also captures the illusion of dominion”. Neilson’s “Exterminate My Heart” came out with Frog Hollow in 2008, and a new book of poems entitled Meniscus will be released this year by Biblioasis.

M. Travis Lane’s piece “In a Glass Darkly” takes “a daring leap from the fireside to the inferno. We look into darkness but are blind to everything except our own reflections, as Dido, dark within, sees only herself in the flames”. Lane has published eleven books, most recently The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand from Sir Wilfred Laurier University Press. Her twelfth book, The All-Nighter’s Radio, from Guernica Editions is forthcoming.

All three chosen poems will be published in Descant’s Fall 2009 issue (#146).

ABOUT THE WINNER —   Marilyn Gear Pilling began writing in 1991. She was featured in Oberon’s Coming Attractions series in 1994. She is the author of two collections of fiction: My Nose Is A Gherkin Pickle Gone Wrong (Cormorant, ‘96) and The Roseate Spoonbill Of Happiness (Boheme, ‘02), and three collections of poetry: The Field Next To Love (Black Moss, ‘02), The Life of the Four Stomachs (Black Moss, ‘06) and Cleavage: A Life In Breasts (Black Moss, ‘07).

:: 2009 Short List ::
(announced Jan 19, 2009)

David Bourgeois
Geoffrey Cook
Joan Crate
Jennifer Footman
Eleanor Gang
Michael Kleiza
M. Travis Lane
John B. Lee
Shane Neilson
Marilyn Gear Pilling
Kathryn Rogers
Norma Rowen
Cora Siré
Elena Vardon
Christine Walde

:: Judges ::
• The judges for the third year of the award were writers Nora Kelly and Eric Wright

		Nora Kelly was born in the United States in 1945. She grew up in Jersey and spent summers on Cape Cod. She now divides her time between Cambridge and Vancouver. She writes novels, short stories and screenplays, teaches part-time and is involved in community activism. Nora is a member of The Writers' Union of Canada and Crime Writers of Canada (and past president).
		Eric Wright was born in London, England and immigrated to Canada in 1951. He is the award-winning author of seventeen crime novels, including his first novel, The Night the Gods Smiled, which won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel, the Crime Writer’s Association’s John Creasey Award, and the City of Toronto Book Award. His memoir, Always Give a Penny to a Blind Man, about growing up poor in working-class London, was published in 1999.