Newfoundland poet and Fiddlehead poetry editor James Langer recently won the prestigious Gerald Lampert Award for his debut collection Gun Dogs (Anansi, 2009), an award that recognizes the best first book of poetry by a Canadian poet.

Langer was up against some great company, including Kate Hall’s The Certainty Dream and Soraya Mariam Peerbaye’s Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names.

The 2010 jury – Barbara Pelman, David Seymour, Sheri-D Wilson — had this to say about Gun Dogs.
“Gun Dogs by James Langer, is a remarkable debut collection. The temptation is to quote huge pieces of these poems, to show off Langer’s dexterity with language, its “thrust and load and drag,” the cleverness of “Half Full,” the intimacy of voice in “Home Suite,” the accomplished play on the Anglo-Saxon poem “Seafarer.” The poems in Gun Dogs range in style from free verse to blank verse to sonnet, quatrains and couplets. Their subject matter is the get-down-and-dirty of ordinary life on the backroads, the bars, the trout-filled rivers and open sea as well as the urban landscapes. Yet there is the whole history of the poetry tradition in these poems: metrical rhythms mixed with references to Pound and F.R. Scott, Ondaatje and Dante. Here is a poet who is sure of his craft, and whose work it is a pleasure to reread again and again.”

Dubbed a “spectacular mouthful” by The Globe & Mail, Gund Dogs has been very well-received. Click here to buy Gun Dogs now

Here is a sample poem, “Thug and Gull,” courtesy of Anansi’s website.

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