Welcome to our Spring issue — I hope you’re feeling or will soon feel the springtime sprightliness of the figure leaping on our cover. And I hope that you likewise will find giant lilac clusters — metaphorical or literal — to brandish joyfully. (Shout out to Raymond Martin for the artwork!)
Did you know that the technical term for a lilac cluster is a “panicle”? And there’s arguably something of the panicle about a literary journal; a group of florets gathered together to create that signature lilac shape is a little like a group of literary works coming together to shape a given issue. . . .
This particular issue is composed of so many different registers of thought and feeling that it’s difficult to do more than point enthusiastically to the pages ahead. But first, let’s pause to congratulate Melanie Power, winner of this year’s Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem. Of “Ode to the Bakeapple,” judge Bertrand Bickersteth writes,
this poem is beautifully sullied with controlled bursts of fun, like “a prophet parting the moss on marshes” or “[the bakeapple] diverges in hue from a day-old bruise” or “for the bakeapple, to ripen is / to lighten.” This enjoyable ode delights the senses as it guides us through the idiosyncrasies of what I would have previously called the very unpoetic East-Coast berry. How wrong I was. We are reminded of its volatile value, its adolescent aspirations, and the nimble know-how of our grandmothers and great aunts. Unlike the fruit, these lively couplets deliver their sweetness — over and over — with ease.
Judge T. Liem says,
though the bakeapple becomes symbol, a way to contemplate land, language, and relation, it also remains itself as fruit. It is a real thing to behold. It is something you can taste. I am awed by this balance, an ode in peak form, how the subject of praise is elevated and yet reachable through sharply observed language and tender appreciation.
And our third judge, Douglas Walbourne-Gough, writes,
There’s a confidence in the looping, loping verse, jackrabbits of assonance and alliteration leaving tracks throughout, and the subtle half-rhymes mid-line are twice as satisfying upon repeated readings. The biblical image of a marsh parting moss via bakeapples, echoing Moses, juxtaposed with the colloquial and familial, all while keeping a finger on the pulse of the land, and the final lines draw in close, quiet and short, mirroring the hushed prayer they refer to.
Big thanks to the judges for their work — I’m waving imaginary lilac clusters in celebration of all three. And celebrating Melanie as well, of course. And celebrating everyone who dared take the leap of entering the contest.
— Sue Sinclair
Fredericton, Wolastoqiyik Territory
