2011 Pat Lowther Award for Poetry

Evelyn Lau announced as the winner of the 2011 Pat Lowther Award from the League of Canadian Poets.

Judges Comments: Living Under Plastic by Evelyn Lau is a journey into illness and death, pain and love, hunger and sacrifice and Lau points an unrelenting search light on them all. She exposes her mother’s hunger, her father’s blindness, her family’s history; her own personal strength. She writes about people compelled to be indifferent:

But it’s true you once said that some men

kill women with knives or guns,

while others kill them silently, over many years,

and no one knows or cares

to prosecute the crime.

Living Under Plastic is a story about ghosts from the past, death of a parent, time spent with friends, a terrified child, dim sum, a man so devastated by the death of his wife that he can’t go on living. Lau writes about her world. The book is personal. It’s global.