Kathleen McCracken


​Awards

Longlisted for 2020 CBC Poetry Prize for 'Tucson Boots'

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Link to 2020 CBC Poetry Prize Longlist Announcement
Article Carrickfergus Times
​

​Tucson Boots
 
We bought the red boots
                                       in Tucson
​
             the pearl grey Stetson
                                                    in Oklahoma City

                            the beaded buckskin jacket
                                                                   in Casper
 
                                         the hand-tooled wild rose billfold
                                                                                 in El Paso
 
 
           No receipt            Paid cash            We were at liberty
 
 
Wearing those red boots I think about
                        how cold the desert is at night
 
and what it must be like to hole up under spikey creosote –
                        no coat or shoes or water
 
When you put on the Stetson
                        do you consider roiling rivers
 
coyotes or the implications
                        of summer snow on the baranca?
 
 
         We are at liberty            Columbian coffee, clementines from Spain
 
 
The morning papers itemize
            the valuables los inmigrantes leave behind –
 
                        hoodies, t-shirts, a Yankees cap
                                    twin rosaries, a wedding ring, a tooth
 
report how border guards cut sign
            spotted seventeen – whole extended family
                        barefoot
 
then lost the trail. Nothing where they looked
            but nets of starlings
                        funnelling their way north to Tamalpais

Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing 2019 for 'Chironomy' 

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Chironomy

 
My father’s hands drew forms from living wood.
 
Oak beams became the level planes 
            of sideboards, bookshelves, kitchen tables
 
crude timber turned to bevelled bowls 
            and spindles, white pine and ash revealed
 
the shapes of animals -
             tortoise, egret, pronghorn.
 
My father’s hands plied saws and blades
            and pulls and tillers
 
untethered hounds, soothed skittish colts
          healed and hewed and harvested
 
weighed up the worth
           of russet pears, rainbow trout.
 
Wind-kissed and dappled
            they displayed the temperament
 
of crack high wire acts –
            Blondin at Niagara
 
Phillipe Petit traversing
             Manhattan in the mist.
 
Long shadows sectioned out
             the days. I saw him lift an adze
 
and set it down. Snow fell.
             The orchard shone
 
and when at last he couldn’t speak 
              his hands divined a rough chironomy
 
conducted chants whose melodies 
              said tundra, pampas, chaparral
 
each one a chorus 
            hymning conquest and escape.
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Read Winner of the Seamus Heaney Award
Listen to Kathleen McCracken Read 'Chironomy'
Read Interview with The Monthly

Poet-in-Residence Bursary, Poetry Ireland/Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, 2017

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First Prize, Second Prize and Commendation
The Glebe House Harmony Community Trust Poetry Competition
​November 23, 2016 


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Short-listed Nominee, The Governor General's Award for Poetry November 1992 
​for Blue Light, Bay and College

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​Blue Light, Bay and College

The way the street crosses itself
in a wirework of steel and shadow
is right
and not right.
 
It is natural the sun sets
behind us. Mid-March
and this is further north
than you have been in my country before.
I should be able to explain
the shifts that signal
a change of season, decipher bright
signatures of resumed spaces.
 
How to account 
for the angle of a glass wall,
the refraction of light
into light, trapezoid that baffles
even the photographer’s eye?
 
There is no saying away
the strangeness of things outside ourselves
suddenly, here. ​
Longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize for 'Tucson Boots'.

Recipient of the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, 2019 for ‘Chironomy’.

Finalist for Grist 2018 Pro Forma Poetry Contest, 2018.

Finalist for The Walrus Poetry Prize, 2017 for ‘Moon With Contrail’.

Shortlisted for The Montreal Poetry Prize, 2017 for ‘You Have to Love Them Enough to Let Them Be Wild’.

Listen to 'You Have to Love Them Enough to Let Them Be Wild' at
https://www.montrealpoetryprize.com/poems/you-have-to-love-them-enough-to-let-them-be-wild


Poet-in-Residence Bursary, Poetry Ireland/Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, 2017.

First Prize, Second Prize and Commendation in the Glebe House Harmony Community Trust Poetry Competition, November 23, 2016 for ‘Basil and the Air Scoop’, ‘High Fidelity’ and ‘My Father’s Last Word’. 

Honourable Mention, WB Yeats Society of New York Poetry Competition, March 2016 for ‘The Fulminologist’.

Anne Szumigalski Editor's Prize, April 2002.

Short-Listed, 1999 Canadian Poetry Chapbook Manuscript Competition, Toronto, June 1999
.

Finalist, National Poetry Contest, Toronto, May 1998 for 'A Tree Asleep at the Centre of a Field'.

Nominated for Governor General's Award for Poetry 1992 for Blue Light, Bay and College.

Editor's Choice Award for Poetry, 
University of Toronto Review, Spring 1985.

​Arts Council of Northern Ireland Support for the Individual Artist Award, December 2014.

Ontario Arts Council Writers’ Reserve Grant, February 2007, 2008, 2010.

 
Ontario Arts Council Writer's Grant 1977, 1980, 1988.
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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  • About
  • Books
  • Awards
  • Projects
  • Interviews and Recordnings
  • Literary Magazines & Anthologies
  • Readings and Launches
  • Contact