After Icebergs by Matthew Hollett
CBC Books | Posted: November 7, 2024 2:30 PM | Last Updated: November 7
The St. John’s writer is on the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize longlist
Matthew Hollett has made the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for After Icebergs.
The winner of the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and have their work published on CBC Books. The four remaining finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.
The shortlist will be announced on Nov. 14 and the winner will be announced on Nov. 21.
If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize opens in January and the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April.
About Matthew Hollett
Matthew Hollett is a writer and photographer in St. John's (Ktaqmkuk). His work explores landscape and memory through photography, writing and walking. Optic Nerve, a collection of poems about photography and visual perception, was published by Brick Books in 2023. It was shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award and longlisted for the BMO Winterset Award. Hollett was named one of CBC Books' writers to watch in 2023.
In 2020, Hollett won the CBC Poetry Prize for Tickling the Scar. Before that, he was on the CBC Poetry Prize longlist in 2016 for Merchant Vessel and Bomb Crater Behind Vimy Station; he also made the longlist for the 2017 CBC Nonfiction Prize for Painting the Curlew.
Entry in five-ish words
"Icebergs as past and future."
The poem's source of inspiration
"I wrote this poem during the doldrums of a dreary St. John's spring — a friend calls it 'the long grey,' as winter lingers interminably, and sunlight can be elusive. The news was full of dire headlines. I was thinking ahead to early summer, when the city fills with tourists. I was also thinking back to a book from 1859 titled After Icebergs with a Painter, with its eloquent prose descriptions of ice. Though undeniably beautiful, icebergs are also fraught with our anxieties about climate change. In years when they are plentiful you're reminded that it's because ice caps are melting, and in years when there are none, their absence seems even more foreboding."
First lines
I'm tired of the future. It arrives in thin envelopes
whispering fine print, sighs from price tags
below bins of bruised tomatoes, clears its throat
from the meteorologist's desk. In early June
it will sing out from shards of shining deep time
spangling the horizon. Hazard-orange tour boats
glittering with fiddle tunes will ferry visitors
whispering fine print, sighs from price tags
below bins of bruised tomatoes, clears its throat
from the meteorologist's desk. In early June
it will sing out from shards of shining deep time
spangling the horizon. Hazard-orange tour boats
glittering with fiddle tunes will ferry visitors
Check out the rest of the longlist
The longlist was selected from more than 2,700 submissions. A team of 12 writers and editors from across Canada compiled the list.
The jury selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the readers' longlisted selections. This year's jury is composed of Shani Mootoo, Garry Gottfriedson and Emily Austin.
The complete longlist is:
- Borderland by Howard Anglin (Calgary)
- on the last day of ramzan, the moon makes the sun in its image by Manahil Bandukwala (Ottawa)
- Lament by Jessica Bebenek (Montreal)
- Citrus Dreams by Elena Bentley (Clavet, Sask.)
- When it's 9:48pm and the kids are asleep and you realize you've spent the entire night on your phone by Nicole Boyce (Calgary)
- ABC Gum by Devlin (Halifax)
- scar/city I by Daniela Elza (Vancouver)
- I Thought I Might by Tamsyn Farr (Wakefield, Que.)
- Score Before Cutting by Claire Gordon (Ucluelet, B.C.)
- There is no neutral way to say I was fourteen by Cicely Grace (Vancouver)
- After Icebergs by Matthew Hollett (St. John's)
- a house in O's name by Eimear Laffan (Nelson, B.C.)
- Gas Station Coffee by Paula Lemke (Langley, B.C.)
- magdalene sonnets by Louie Leyson (Vancouver)
- 吃苦 (Eat the Bitterness) by Emily Yiling Ma (Burnaby, B.C.)
- Kananaskis by Kathleen McCracken (Belfast, Northern Ireland)
- A Tenuous Life Act, I Lay Dreaming by Sasha Pickering (Halifax)
- Regeneration and other poems by Katherine Poyner (Nanaimo, B.C.)
- Girls of the Now by Dora Prieto (Vancouver)
- No Apples and Oranges by Marion Quednau (Sechelt, B.C.)
- i'll expect big things from the moon later tonight by c. a. r. rafuse (Ottawa)
- Song for the Earth and the Water by Harold Rhenisch (Vernon, B.C.)
- Palimpsest County by Rachel Robb (Toronto)
- Doom Scroll by Jenny Sampirisi (Toronto)
- Northern Childhood by Eleonore Schönmaier (Ketch Harbour, N.S.)
- Some Notes on Intoxication and Simile: Like Butterscotch by Catherine St. Denis (Victoria)
- The Killer and the Harpist by Catherine St. Denis (Victoria)
- The Rupture by Ayşe Lara Yildirim (Toronto)