By Innika La Fontaine

Ottawa poet Diana Brebner won the Gerald Lampert Award in 1991 and the Pat Lowther Award three years later. Because Brebner was an inspiring mentor to young writers until she died of cancer at the age of 44 in 2001, now her own legacy lives on via the Diana Brebner Prize for Poetry bestowed annually by Arc: Canada's National Poetry Magazine.

To honour the 2009 Brebner Prize winner Gillian Wallace and celebrate the launch of edition #63, Arc will host a night of poetry readings on Tuesday, February 16 at Collective Works (1242 Wellington), 7:30 p.m.

“Diana didn’t understand people who where afraid of sharing their creative energy,” says Lesley Buxton, an Arc board member and friend of the late poet. Buxton feels that sharing was Brebner’s way of drawing more creativity out of people.

The drive to create with poetry is evident in Wallace’s winning poem, “Crow, of the family Corvidae,” and in how it was created.

“I was sitting in the living room of our old house, wanting to write a poem, and feeling uninspired,” Wallace recalls. “I raised my head and looked out the window. There, in the big tree in a neighbour’s garden, was a gathering of crows. And I couldn’t hear them because of our blasted refrigerator’s hum. ‘Write about that,’ I told myself. ‘Just do it’.”

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Crow, of the family Corvidae

by Gillian Wallace

The blackness of birds, a flotilla flying silently
in the blue of my window, cawing held
by glass, refrigerator hum, the wisp
of a passing cloud. They look so clean
from here, beaks that have never known
the soft meat of a lamb’s eye or how
a squirrel comes, one strand at a time,
off a flattened road. Not for them
the singleness of chair, cup, bed. Instead
an updraft to a chatter of trees, a caw-fest lasting
until age black-downs them in the mud.

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At 32 years of age, Arc is Canada's oldest poetry magazine with an uninterrupted publishing history.

“We are dedicated solely to new poetry and prose about poetry—whether reviews, essays or interviews,” says editor Anita Lahey.

Arc gives one of the biggest annual poetry prizes in the country, the $1500 Poem of the Year award, and offers arguably the broadest and most in-depth review coverage of poetry collections in Canada.

“Because [Tuesday’s] event is in honour of the winners of the Diana Brebner Prize for Poetry, it also gives people the opportunity to hear and meet new voices,” added Lahey, “poets who are just beginning to emerge, who show skill and promise, and whose work is in some way exciting.”

“[Diana] put a great deal of effort into nurturing and mentoring the poets and writers coming up behind her, including several people who have been involved in Arc over the years,” said Lahey, who counts herself among those aided by Brebner.

“We named this award for emerging poets in her honour because of that work that she did, and also to keep her finely wrought poetry in the public eye.”

Gillian Wallace