Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize winners to be named Wednesday

The nominees for this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize are Iman Mersal and Robyn Creswell (for The Threshhold, translated by Creswell), Ada Limón (The Hurting Kind), Canada’s Susan Musgrave (Exculpatory Lilies), Roger Reeves (Best Barbarian) and Ocean Vuong (Time Is a Mother).

On Wednesday evening at Toronto’s Koerner Hall, the contenders for the $130,000 international award will read from their short-listed books and the winner will be announced. The Globe and Mail asked each of the writers about the poetry they are currently enjoying. (American poet Limón was unable to participate.)

Robyn Creswell

“One book I’ve been reading is Maureen N. McLane’s new collection, What We Want. I love the range of her voice, its philosophical flights and sudden dips into the vernacular, its poignancy and comic verve. She’s so effortlessly of the moment. This book takes in fresh landscapes – the New England shoreline in particular – and if you’ve been reading McLane for a long time, as I have, it’s wonderful to listen to her voice echoing in this new environment.

I’ve also been reading Donna Stonecipher’s The Ruins of Nostalgia, which isn’t yet published. It’s a book about the peculiar nostalgia of city dwellers for earlier versions of the place where they live. It’s also about our common nostalgia, in a world of screens, for more meaningful forms of art and community. Each of her prose poems is a lyrical essay: They make you think and sometimes they make you cry.”

Iman Mersal

“Grenade in Mouth: Some Poems of Miyó Vestrini. The poems in the selection cover three decades of Vestrini’s work from 1960 to 1990 and are translated by different translators. Vestrini’s unique voice is firmly engraved in each line: in an elegy of one of her closest friends, she writes, ‘he died like an idiot / of a heart attack treated with chamomile tea.’”

Susan Musgrave

“Who else would I be reading, at this nail-biting juncture, but my fellow short-listed Griffin Prize poets? Ada Limón spies a belted kingfisher in Drowning Creek – my favourite bird exonerated after being expunged from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Ocean Vuong’s dog, Susan, was on her way to her own funeral when he facilitated her escape: Well done! From Roger Reeves I learned about the tongue, in particular a parasitic crustacean that attaches itself to the tongues of spotted rose snappers and extracts blood until the tongue atrophies and falls off. I now equate Karl Marx with brightly lit windows overflowing with lingerie thanks to Robyn Creswell’s translations of one of Iman Mersal’s poems from the Arabic.”

Roger Reeves

“I am always reading a variety of things simultaneously. The current circulation of books includes Yusef Komunyakaa’s Thieves of Paradise and Chameleon Couch and Jay Wright’s The Presentable Art of Reading Absence. These texts are accompanying me about the house – from bedside to office to kitchen. The collections by Komunyakaa and Wright are ones that I revisit with some regularity. They help me think about rhythm, language, meditational possibility.”

Ocean Vuong

“I am currently making my way through Tomas Transtromer’s Selected Poems, edited by Robert Hass. Unsurprisingly, as a New England author, I have found great kinship in his poems inspired by the cold and snowy landscapes of Sweden. But I also admire his courageous associative leaps, his willingness to distort reason and physics with an elusive yet potent surrealism, and perhaps most of all the capacious compassion his lines hold for the world and the people in it.”