Dorothy Kathleen May Livesay, OCOBCFRSC (October 12, 1909 – December 29, 1996) was a Canadian poet who twice won the Governor General's Award in the 1940s, and was "senior woman writer in Canada" during the 1970s and 1980s.[1]
In the early 1940s Livesay suggested to Anne Marriott, Floris McLaren, and Doris Ferne that they start a poetry magazine which would serve as a vehicle for poets outside the somewhat closed Montreal circle. Alan Crawley agreed to edit the magazine, and the first issue of Contemporary Verse appeared in September 1941,[5] After Macnair died in 1959, Livesay worked for UNESCO in Paris, and then in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) as a field worker from 1960 to 1963.
Livesay's first collection of poetry, Green Pitcher, was published in 1928, when she was only nineteen. The Encyclopedia of Literature says, "these were well-crafted poems that not only showed skilled use of the imagist technique but prefigured Margaret Atwood's condemnations of exploitative and fearful attitudes to the Canadian landscape." The book "later disappointed Livesay by its failure to deal openly with social issues.[citation needed]
She published her first short story, "Heat", in the Canadian Mercury at the same age (in January, 1929).[2] Her second book of poems, Signpost (1932), "showed the increasing sophistication of her imagist skills, as in 'Green rain', and an original sense of feminine sexuality."[citation needed]
When her Selected Poems were published in 1956, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye said of them:
Miss Livesay is an imagist who started off, in Green Pitcher (1929), in the Amy Lowell idiom.... With Day and Night (1944) a social passion begins to fuse the diction, tighten the rhythm, and concentrate the imagery.... From "Prelude for Spring" on, the original imagist texture gradually returns.... The basis of Miss Livesay's imagery is the association between winter and the human death-impulse and between spring and the human capacity for life. Cutting across this is the irony of the fact that spring tends to obliterate the memory of winter, whereas human beings enjoying love and peace retain an uneasy sense of the horrors of hatred and war....
The dangers of imagism are facility and slackness, and one reads through this book with mixed feelings. But it is one of the few rewards of writing poetry that the poet takes his ranking from his best work. Miss Livesay's most distinctive quality, I think, is her power of observing how other people observe, especially children. Too often her own observation goes out of focus, making the love poems elusive and the descriptive ones prolix, but in the gentle humour of 'The Traveller,' in 'The Child Looks Out,' in 'On Seeing,' in the nursery-rhyme rhythm of 'Abracadabra,' and in many other places, we can see what Professor Desmond Pacey means by "a voice we delight to hear."[8]
Awards and honours
Livesay won the Governor General's Award, Canada's top poetry honour, twice: in 1944 for Day and Night, and in 1947 for Poems for People.[1] The Royal Society of Canada elected her as a Fellow, and awarded her its Lorne Pierce Medal, in 1947. Livesay also won the Queen's Canada Medal in 1977, and the Persons Case Award for the Status of Women in 1984.[9]
In 1983 she was made a Doctor of Athabasca University and in 1987 she became an Officer of the Order of Canada.[1] Livesay was awarded the Order of British Columbia in 1992. The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize is a category of the BC Book Prizes that is awarded to authors of the best work of poetry in a given year, where those authors are British Columbia or Yukon residents, or have been for three of the last five years. Originally known as the B.C. Prize for Poetry, in 1989 it was named after Livesay.
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