Boyd Up

Good news! Toronto poet Alex Boyd has recently won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for his book of poems Making Bones Walk. The award, named after an arts administrator who took a particular interest in young poets, is handled by the League of Canadian Poets, and always goes to a first book of poems published in the previous year. Boyd has also been busy co-editing I.V. Lounge Nights, an anthology of 29 poets and fiction writers who appeared in his series, the I.V. Lounge Reading Series. In addition, he's the reviews editor for the online journal Northern Poetry Review, and putting the finishing touches on a novel.

It might be fair to say that Eyewear saw this coming. Here's the endorsement I'd written for the back of the book: "Alex Boyd gives us back the world, as if remade by thoughtful, inventive and always engaged language, in this excellent debut collection. Boyd's concerns are strikingly mature for a young poet - to examine closely, to record faithfully, and to speak out in memorable lines with style and clarity. The concern and care he shows, for both the formal richness of English poetry, and histories both sensual and political, is exemplary. He gives us lessons, about power, pain, hard light, and possible grace. Time and again, poems here had me stopping, returning, moved by the possibility that he might just be one of the best new poets of his emergent generation.”