George McWhirter is an Irish-Canadian writer, translator, editor, teacher, and Vancouver’s first Poet Laureate. His first book of poetry, Catalan Poems, was a joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize with Chinua Achebe’s Beware, Soul Brother. He has translated works by Mario Arregui, Carlos Fuentes, and José Emilio Pacheco.
He received his M.A. from the University of British Columbia and stayed on to become a full professor in 1983 and head of the Creative Writing Department from 1983 to 1993. He retired as a Professor Emeritus in 2005.
He was made a life member of the League of Canadian Poets in 2005 and is also a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada, and PEN International. He currently writes full-time and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Judges’ Citation
The book’s enchanting variety of tones and subjects expresses a rounded human being engaged with our total experience, from the familial to the political, from bodily sensations to dream, vision, philosophic thought, and history, from hope to foreboding.
Selected poems
by George McWhirter
All of my yesterdays
fit in one hand
all my wins
I carry in a bag with holes in it
when I move I win
one place and lose another
presence and absence
are the same
all of my yesterdays
fit in one empty
hand
Copyright © 2023, George McWhirter, translated from the Spanish written by Homero Aridjis, Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, New Directions Publishing
All of my yesterdays
the Spanish written by Homero Aridjis
I never thought I’d spend my eightieth
in a year of plague and populists.
But here I am, confined to my house
in Mexico City, accompanied by Betty,
my wife—all life long,
and by three feral cats that came in off the street;
and oh, by the Virgin of the Apocalypse’s image
lit day and night on the stairway wall.
Astral twins, my daughters Chloe and Eva
have turned into my spiritual mothers,
and Josephine, my only grandchild, into a playful grandma.
They are in London and Brooklyn, separated from us,
behind windows, seeing and hearing
the ambulances of death pass by.
Paradises there are that have no country
and my suns are interior suns,
and love—more so than dream—
is a second life,
and I will live it to the last moment
in the tremendous everydayness of the mystery.
Surrounded by light and the warbling of birds,
I live in a state of poetry,
because for me, being and making poetry are the same.
For that I would want, in these final days,
like Titian, to depict the human body one more time.
Dust I shall be, but dust in love.
Copyright © 2023, George McWhirter and Betty Ferber, translated from the Spanish written by Homero Aridjis, Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, New Directions Publishing
Self-Portrait At Age Eighty
the Spanish written by Homero Aridjis
Copyright © 2023, George McWhirter, translated from the Spanish written by Homero Aridjis, Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, New Directions Publishing
Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence
the original written by Homero Aridjis
Tepeyollotli, heart of the mountain
1
That one who was the image of rain
no longer leaves trails through the jungle,
the gold discs of his eyes
no longer blink brightly.
He isn’t to be seen
in the morning sun floating on a log
down the Sacred Monkey River.
His solar pelt is a rug.
The heart of the mountain no longer wears
black-and-white markings on its chest
nor does the volute, cloud of speech that names things
scroll from his molten jaws.
His mute cry
booms out
my extinction.
2
Sad jaguar of the mythologies
who on devouring the sun devoured himself,
who on turning into the devouring Earth
devoured his own shadow in the night sky.
Orphan god of the Underworld
who, on following in the tracks of man,
was tricked by his masks
and fell into his snares.
Poor jaguar of the resplendent,
in his skin he carried death.
3
Before words
when, in the bowels of the night,
there was neither fowl
nor tree
nor fish
nor river
nor sun
in the night sky,
the jaguar
meowed.
4
The jaguar that went away
is on its way,
the jaguar that came back
still hasn’t come
the jaguar of we two
within you
watches me from outside
5
Our bodies
two solar jaguars
faced off in the night
will end clawed up
in the total dawn
Copyright © 2023, George McWhirter, translated from the Spanish written by Homero Aridjis, Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, New Directions Publishing
The Jaguar
the Spanish written by Homero Aridjis
- What Befalls the Outsider: An Interview with Poet Laureate George McWhirter
- Interview with George McWhirter Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review
- Writers’ Union of Canada Profile