In addition to winning the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize, Anne Simpson‘s second collection of poetry, Loop, was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award in 2003. Her first collection of poetry, Light Falls Through You (2000), won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Atlantic Poetry Prize. Her first novel, Canterbury Beach (2001), was shortlisted for the 2002 Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. In 1997, her short story “Dreaming Snow” shared the Journey Prize.
Simpson received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Queen’s University, and a diploma in Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design. Subsequently, she was a CUSO volunteer English teacher for two years in Nigeria. She has been the recipient of two Nova Scotia Arts Council grants and several Canada Council grants. Currently she lives with her family in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, where she teaches part-time at St. Francis Xavier University. In the fall of 2004, she will be artist-in-residence at the Dalhousie Medical Humanities Program in Halifax.
Simpson’s volume of poetry Quick won the 2008 Pat Lowther Award. Her novel Falling was released in early 2008.
Judges’ Citation
A troubled and generous spirit pervades and inspires Simpson’s achievement of craft and lyric in these poems.
The twin towers collapsing in New York, a plane spiralling down into the sea, a suicide’s fatal leap, even a flying carpet ‘riding on the wing of darkness’, such images of falling recur in Anne Simpson’s poetry with disturbing frequency. But as if to catch the fragments from these scenes of fracture, ellipses, loops, skeins and joinings, and the planets on their rounds also make appearances. Many poems are composed in sequences: a breath-taking demonstration of a ‘Möbius Strip’ glides across the middle of ten beautiful pages of Loop. A down-to-earth series, ‘The Trailer Park’, juxtaposes a mundane world of low-rent lives, family squabbles and love-making against the struggles of great astronomers who helped domesticate the skies. A troubled and generous spirit pervades and inspires Simpson’s achievement of craft and lyric in these poems.
Selected poems
by Anne Simpson
Night was woven through with what we said,
a Persian rug, patterned with random stars.
We sat on the windowsill of a ruined
farmhouse, all of us quiet after talking.
Weeds lay tangled below, a great square
of something intricate, unknown,
and I thought how it could be caught
by four corners: a carpet lifted
into the dark, undulating up and up.
I might have been pulled into the blue-black,
too high, too far, but something called me
back. Yesterday, kayaking, I recalled it
near a silver stretch where herons gather
at low tide. Just beyond,
water runs deeper, faster, the eel grass
slowly brushed this way and that, farther
down. We’d paddled back the wrong way,
though I liked the shallows and then
the cool green deeps. There, before us, birds
ascended as if drawing something
with them, the sheen of water, a wavering
transparency. We could see the slant
of fields, scattered houses and barns,
orange buoys comically bobbing,
and currents opening to reveal,
lower down, many liquid stairways.
Copyright © 2003 Anne Simpson
Carpets
The Triumph of Death
These watches. Ticking, still. Each hour is cold:
the rims surround quick voices. Shut in rooms.
Gone. Tick. The towers. Tock. A fold
in air. We’re smoke, drifting. A painted doom
where cities burn and ships go down. Death’s
dark sky – a grainy docudrama. Time
swings bones on circus wheels. Listen: wind’s breath,
a shriek. Theatrum Mundi. In their prime,
the living. Leapt. That buckling of the knees.
Then gunshots: plastic bags on fences. Snapping.
Or loose. Thank you – shop – at. The lovers see
nothing. He plays a lute. She sings. Clapping –
machines sift through debris for the remains.
A sales receipt, a shoe. The silvery rain.
Copyright © 2003 Anne Simpson
from Seven Paintings by Brueghel
This is the woman you don’t know,
— unnamed, undone —
though you’ve heard how she turned
for a last look and that
was that. No time
for those twelve chapters
to creative awakening, with accompanying
exercises. Lot kept his head
down. Why is it that a woman can’t
give up what’s already gone? We all know
what curiosity plus cat equals. This time
God snapped his fingers,
reduced the city to ash,
along with two of Lot’s daughters, sons-in-law,
twins in the polks-dot stroller,
rattles on the rug,
a whatnot full of souvenirs:
the straw donkey from Spain, clay vase
from Mexico with the crack in it. Dishes
still in the sink, phone off the hook
and the voice of the angel
echoing loud in everyone’s ear.
Told you so.
After that
who was left
to pick up the pieces? Soon Lot was sleeping
with his younger daughters,
but it was all so dreamlike. Across the plain,
the city kept burning. People made little cries
of distress, flames leapt
from one building
to another. Smoke filled the air.
Copyright © 2003 Anne Simpson