’This Place’ Poetry Contest Winners!

Announcing the winners of our "This Place" Poetry Contest

We would like to thank Douglas Barbour for judging our contest. Douglas Barbour is a poet and critic living in Edmonton. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, University of Alberta. Fragmenting Body Etc and Breath Takes are the most recent of his many books of poetry.

First Place

"Hundedagene and the Foxtail Phenomenon" by Vivian Hansen
"...for its lovely exploration of language and settlement in a new place."

Hundedagene and the Foxtail Phenomenon

my Danish mother says
this is the word for Dog Days
that sounds the howl between
the full moons of  July and  August

a searing time
when heat waves slow air
and logic retreats
into shadow

Hundedagene, when fickle, hot days
cling to her immigrant throat
translate language
into foxtail burrs on Immigrant Street. 
Blakiston Drive in 1961
Colonial Calgary

prairie sloughs dry like wasted tongues
spew foxtails, a new Canadian word
for destiny
for the hair
and shape
of the dog that shifts
in August wind
when the fox runs too fast and loses her tail.
ejects her scent
a dozen words for hundedagene
camouflage
in visible
clever
stealthy
persistent
sticky as awns

English dries my mother
tongue, with the others
who live on this street
the ones who plant potatoes on their front lawn
a cheap root vegetable for a brutal Calgary winter
defying the waste of seeded grass
inedible as this new language.

hundedagene
the word for how you begin 
with $500 worth of government incentive
build homes over a dry slough
comb the tails of stealthy fox
leaning like kittens against your ankles

these foxtails the totem of immigrants
who shift and settle with the prairie wind
foxtails that fly during Hundedagene
understand themselves as a life force
they resist permission
to move
or to lie still
to land, in the habitat
of a Calgary prairie

Vivian Hansen is a Calgary poet. Her book of poetry: Leylines of My Flesh captures the stories of Danish immigration to western Canada.

Second Place

"Oil Fields #2.  Oil Sands, Fort McMurray, Alberta" by Ian LeTourneau
"...for its sharp vision, both photographic and political."

Oil Fields #24. Oil Sands, Fort McMurray, Alberta

(after a photograph of Edward Burtynsky)
You might think badlands at first,
but this landscape has been overturned,
sapped. Earth itself industrialized,
under revision.

This might be its final form, sandy
residuum, littered with the jargon of
lease agreements: reclamation, self-sustaining,
productive. It frightens me sometimes
how these great machinations gnash on. 
How the landscape can be mutated like this or
language: armamentarium to Armageddon.

One bulldozer, off-centred, signifies
I suppose, that our journey is industrial,
that this, last century’s horizon, merges
with the future’s receding green. The sky,
though light and wispy with clouds,
is the steady back beat of the blues.

Ian LeTourneau’s chapbook, Defining Range, was published in 2006 by Gaspereau Press. His poems have won awards, most recently CBC's Alberta Anthology in 2005 and 2006, and his reviews have appeared, in addition to Legacy, in Books in Canada, The Fiddlehead, and many online venues.

Third Place

"5 AM at Wainwright Crossing" by Audrey J. Whitson
"...for its sense of various space (& sounds) intersecting there."

5 AM at Wainwright Crossing

Crossing lights go red and clang
rail cars strum the air
the high twang of hoppers
oil tanks an empty baritone
lumber flatbeds a slow hollow
hrush rush rush arum
a chorus of rolling stock
and overhead a nebula

Orion the burning eye
making his rounds
every night the fast freight
pulled to the next
and the next station
whether we move or stand
still the universe is speeding
further out of reach

Through the long darkness
shoulder leaning into glass
hand on the throttle
what does the driver see?
white-tailed deer? snowshoe hare?
pressing the deadman’s pedal
does he note the constellations
watch for planets passing?

Honourable Mention

"Thursdays with Mom" and "Sewing Basket" by Pierrette Requier

Thursdays with Mom

thursday mornings i go spend time with Mom at the home and to her the home   isn’t home there is nothing to do and she can’t serve tea it wouldn’t be safe the staff explains and I’m not used to Mom doing nothing and neither is she and she’s restless and she becomes more herself when we can manage to go for a walk outside where she gets to point out the beauty of changing leaves and still revel in colour and that there are ripe apples on some trees and she mimics stealing some because most of her words are gone and I understand that and play along with her make fun but she can’t always be coaxed and it isn’t always fun to be with her so I take to going at night instead when I can put her to bed and tuck her in and remember that sleep has always been a balm to my Mom and she quietens and as I look in her young perfect eyes I know I’m the mother now

sewing basket

my Mom’s alzheimer’s rips seams breaks threads and frays the fabric of her crazy quilt life steals her flesh leaves a scant swatch of her her dressed in an outfit of bare bones bones jerking underneath her face like mexican jumping beans sharp witty words sudden snips of humour and a few well placed cusses poke through her mouth like needles on taut framed fabric visitors clasp and button her to her past sometimes return an almost lost mother like a dome fastener click into her love for babies and small children thick like butterscotch on a sundae restores le beau visage de notre mère like a well darned sock in her single bed at night she prays clasping her spring green rosary to her heart this lulls her to early sleep a too early sleep

and the staff doesn’t like that because she gets up earlier and earlier and is hungry and wants to be fed and breakfast is served only at eight o’clock and some of the residents like to sleep in you know and she’s trouble

Pierrette Requier was nominated from Global Woman of Vision in 2005 for her work with women and writing, and holds a Master of Theological Studies from St. Stephen’s College in Edmonton.  She created the Wind Eye Writing Circle Seminars, has been a member of the Stroll of Poets Society for fifteen years, and has performed her poetry across Alberta.