6 April 2006
Jan Zwicky Shortlisted for
Pat Lowther Award

Gaspereau Press is pleased to announce that Jan Zwicky’s Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences (Gaspereau Press, 2005) has been shortlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Fellow nominees are Anne Compton for Processional (Fitzhenry & Whiteside), Margaret Christakos for Sooner (Coach House Books), Sylvia Legris for Nerve Squall (Coach House Books), Erin Moure for Little Theatres (House of Anansi) and Carolyn Marie Souaid for Satie’s Sad Piano (Signature Editions).

The League of Canadian Poets gives the award annually to a female Canadian poet who has published in the previous year. The award is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, a poet whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $1,000 prize. This year’s winner will be announced on 10 June 2006 at the League’s 40th Annual General Meeting in Ottawa. For more information about the League and this award, please visit www.poets.ca

BACKGROUND
Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences is a vital addition to a remarkable body of work. The songs in this collection are miniature odes, lyric apostrophes to household fixtures, human emotions, shades of light, currents of air, sounds, departures and solitudes. Zwicky’s poems walk the tightrope between thinking and being, strengthening the act of imagination that connects past, present and future. This collection is also on the shortlist for the 2006 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.

Jan Zwicky is a musician, philosopher and award-winning poet. Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences is her sixth collection of poems. In 1999 her collection Songs for Relinquishing the Earth won the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. In 2004 her philosophic work Wisdom & Metaphor (Gaspereau Press, 2003) and poetry collection Robinson’s Crossing were both nominated for Governor General’s Awards. Zwicky teaches philosophy at the University of Victoria.

Gaspereau Press is a literary publisher and printer based in Kentville, Nova Scotia. The press is committed to literature and the book arts, incorporating a range of modern and antique forms of printing and binding to create books that are distinctive in manufacture and design. Its publications have won numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the Alberta Book Award for fiction, and numerous Alcuin Awards for excellence in book design.

For more information contact
Beth Crosby at Gaspereau Press
47 Church Avenue, Kentville, NS, B4N 2M7
902-678-6002, info@gaspereau.com