Press Release: September 14, 2009
Lampman-Scott Award 2008 Winner
Winner: The Bindery by Shane Rhodes
The Lampman-Scott Award is administered by the Arc Poetry Society, and is awarded each year to a book of Poetry written by a poet living in the National Capital Region. Arc was happy to announce at the Ottawa Book Awards that the winner of the 2008 Lampman-Scott Award for Poetry has gone to Shane Rhodes for his book The Bindery.
Judge Harold Rhenisch calls the books a “masterful series of inventions that reads like a whole library of broadsides and chapbooks, as Rhodes takes a great range of contemporary uses of language and experiments with their interface with the lyrical tradition. The language has an exceptional balance of freedom and control, and the poems ring with a resonant and generous voice.”
Judge Alison Pick comments that “There is a remarkable intelligence at work in The Bindery, and an uncanny facility with language: the ability to both pin down and to transport, often in the same poem, the same line. This kind of poetic exuberance married with such formal control is uncommon indeed. The Bindery is a wonderful achievement.
Arc’s third Judge Michael deBeyer writes of The Bindery: “If poetry should include rhythm, structure, imagery, metaphor, narrative, and a bevy of poetic devices (alliteration, assonance, synecdoche, etc.), as well as some lift, some romance or extra-philosophical rendering, some reason d’etre, and risk, then The Bindery has it all. The Bindery coheres in the metaphorical riffs between artifacts, uniting them as a whole, like a journal coheres a life. And I would say there is something chronological about the way the book is formed; each section, by subject matter, seems to identify a specific place and time.”
