Update

Poor Seamus, better luck next time!

winners

Dionne Brand (left), Canadian winner, for Ossuaries

and

Gjertrud Schnakenberg, International Winner, for Heavenly Questions

photographed here with Scott Griffin.

Seamus Heaney

My date, from The Third Annual Willow Manor Ball,

Poet, Seamus Heaney

is a finalist for the 

Griffin Poetry Prize

Canada's most generous poetry award.

His submission is called

Human Chain.

When asked about the mournful quality of the poems he replied:

"You get to a certain age and several of the people who were fixed stars in your life begin to fall. You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality. A couple of poems in the book which end up being among the most elegiac were written before my stroke — I’m thinking of “The Baler” and “In the Attic.” But no doubt the stroke heightened the elegiac quotient, although it also brought on a surge of writing energy and in the months after it I wrote a lot of the things included in Human Chain."

I'll just be popping along to the bookstore now.

Good Luck Seamus!