Trio Shortlisted for Pat Lowther Memorial Award

We are very excited to announce that Trio, a collection of 120 sonnets and part of our Hugh Maclennan Poetry Series, has been shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial award. Congratulations to Sarah Tolmie for this well-deserved honour.

The Pat Lowther Memorial Award has been awarded annually since 1981 by The League of Canadian Poets (LCP), and is awarded to a book published in the preceding year by a Canadian woman. The prize is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. This year’s winner will be announced at a special luncheon during the Canadian Writers’ Summit in Toronto, ON, on Saturday, June 18, 2016.

“What a sensually moving, wildly fun, bitingly intelligent, uniquely playful, and downright witty collection of sonnets! Tolmie’s Trio is a beautifully sad and deeply aware love poem that moves like lovers and dancers. It is a home for modern love – self -love, partnership, commitment and pain held in the arms of the traditional sonnet form that in its passionate present-day storytelling, elevates the form into an engaging re-imagining that is excitingly challenging yet addictive. Trio’s narrator is a woman to know –  to dance with, to make love to, to fight with, to love.” – Pat Lowther Memorial Award Jury

Trio

By Sarah Tolmie

One woman. Two lovers. It’s a complicated dance.

A collection of 120 sonnets in eight parts, Trio reveals, frame by frame, a married fortysomething female narrator in love with two younger men – an intellectual and a dancer – and torn between the claims of body and mind.

In the tradition of Renaissance sonnet sequences from Petrarch onward, the narrator’s love objects are constantly before her eyes, and thus before ours, creating compassion, comedy, and desire. They are real and imaginary, opposite and complementary, present and unavailable, autonomous and dependent. Tolmie’s characters circle and shadow one another in every dance, spinning until fantasy becomes flesh and entanglement. In immortalizing the beloved, she draws on the power of both poetic and human reproduction.

Like the contact improvisation modern dance form that influences the collection, these poems are both expressive and analytical. Through a singular feminist revision of a traditional poetic form, they tell the story – sometimes raunchy, sometimes crushingly sad – of a strong protagonist and the predicament she’s in.

Read more about Trio