Douglas Lochhead

Douglas Grant Lochhead (pronounced Lock-heed) FRSC (March 25, 1922 – March 15, 2011) was a Canadian poet, academic librarian, bibliographer and university professor who published more than 30 collections of poetry over five decades, from 1959 to 2009. He was a founding member and vice-chairman of the League of Canadian Poets and was elected its first secretary in 1968. He served as president of the Bibliographical Society of Canada (1974–1976), and was a member of bibliographical societies in the U.S. and Britain. In 1976, he was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He also received the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English-language Literary Arts in 2001 and the following year, became the first poet laureate for the town of Sackville, New Brunswick, where he had lived since joining the faculty at Mount Allison University in 1975.

During his academic career, Douglas Lochhead held library appointments at several universities including Cornell, Dalhousie and York, before his appointment as Founding Librarian of Massey College at the University of Toronto in 1963. After he became Davidson Chair of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison in 1975, Lochhead continued writing and publishing his many collections of poetry.

"I think Douglas thought of poetry as a form of resistance," his friend and fellow poet Peter Sanger told The Globe and Mail following Lochhead's death in 2011. "A form o resistance to non-poetic thinking, to tyranny, to unimaginative views of the world."

Lochhead's mother, Helen Van Wart, was an accomplished pianist and piano teacher who was born in Saint John, New Brunswick. "I was rushed to Fredericton at the age of two or three months to be baptized," Lochhead told an interviewer in 1988, adding that the ceremony took place in the home of his maternal grandparents. He agreed that although he lived and went to school for most of the year in Ottawa, as a boy, his heart was in Canada's Maritime provinces. "We heard so much about it from my mother, who was a great Maritimer, but not overbearing, not tiresome—she had a healthy, natural enthusiasm about where she was from." As a result of his mother's Maritime roots, Lochhead spent his boyhood summers at Duck Cove, near Saint John on the Bay of Fundy. Years later, he wrote about the significance of the early experiences he had there. "or me, they help to explain the sense and feeling of place and people, which have become part of my poetry. They help to account for a closeness, a confidence which I have in being in the Maritimes."

Education and military service

In 1939, Douglas Lochhead enrolled in the pre-medical program at McGill University following in the scientific footsteps of his microbiologist father and his paternal grandfather William Lochhead who taught botany, genetics, geology and zoology at Macdonald College in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, and who, in 1908, had founded the Quebec Society for the Protection of Plants from Insects and Fungous Diseases. Douglas Lochhead remembered spending many enjoyable hours in his grandfather's library reading his scientific papers, his collection of 19th century poetry and books by authors ranging from Darwin to Dickens. Lochhead completed his pre-medical Bachelor of Arts degree in 1943 and was accepted into medicine.

Lochhead was still in the army when he attended a friend's wedding in Toronto. He visited the University of Toronto campus and suddenly decided to pursue post-graduate studies there in English. He wrote his thesis on the British poets of the First World War earning his Master's degree in 1947.

Massey College

In 1963, Lochhead was recruited by writer Robertson Davies, Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, to found the library there. Aside from running the library, he taught bibliography, the history of printing and also served as a professor of English.

Lochhead had first become interested in bibliography, printing and the history of the book at Dalhousie. He developed those interests at Massey College as he and Davies built its bibliographical collection so that the Massey library would be useful to the whole university. "e decided to build as complete a collection of every Canadian imprint, every impression, edition, or whatever, of Canadian poetry and prose," he said. "So, the Massey library and my interests both became biographical."

September 22

the horse limps out of the covered bridge. a girl leads it. she is teaching it to go into darkness. into new noises, silences. into darkness. yes

---High Marsh Road

When his wife, Jean, died of cancer in 1991, Lochhead elegized her in the sequence Black Festival (1991) and in "Elegies 1-10," which appeared in Homage to Henry Alline & Other Poems (1992). In 1998, heart problems required him to undergo triple-bypass surgery. He was named Sackville's first poet laureate in 2002 in recognition of his status as a writer whose work reflected an intense interest in and sensitivity to local places. Increasingly frail, he moved to a Sackville nursing home in 2009 and died there on March 15, 2011.

Honours In 1977, Lochhead received the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal. The Bibliographical Society of Canada awarded him the Marie Tremaine Medal in 1985. In 1987 he received honorary doctorates from Saint Mary's University (D.Litt.) and Dalhousie University (L.L.D). In 2006, the University of New Brunswick awarded Lochhead an honorary doctor of letters degree. His High Marsh Road was a finalist for the Governor-General's Award for Poetry, and in 2005 he received the Carlo Betocchi International Poetry Prize for High Marsh Road / La Strada di Tantramar. He was also a recipient of the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English-language Literary Arts.

The Red Jeep and Other Landscapes: A Collection in Honour of Douglas Lochhead, edited by Peter Thomas, appeared on his retirement in 1987.

Works The Heart is Fire (1959) An old woman looks out on Gabarus Bay remembering history, June 8, 1958 (1959) It Is All Around (1960) Shepherds Before Kings (1963) Poet Talking (1964) A & B & C &: An Alphabet (1969) Millwood Road Poems (1970) Prayers in a Field: Ten Poems (1974) The Full Furnace: Collected Poems (1975) High Marsh Road: Lines for a Diary (1980). Published in Italian as La Strada di Tantramar (2004) A & E, 16/3/80-23/3/80: A Long Poem. (1980; rev. ed. Harrier Editions, 1998) Battle Sequence: Poems (1980) The Panic Field: Prose Poems (1984) Tiger in the Skull: New and Selected Poems, 1959-1985. Fiddlehead Poetry Books/Goose Lane Editions (1986) Upper Cape Poems. Goose Lane Editions (1989) . Dykelands (With Thaddeus Holownia) (1989) Black Festival: A Long Poem (1991) Homage to Henry Alline and Other Poems (1992) Charlie, Boo Boo, Nutley Clutch and others: Twelve Canadian Jollies, Lovelies: Poems (1997) Breakfast at Mel's and Other Poems of Love and Places (1997) All Things Do Continue: Poems of Celebration (1997) Millwood Road Poems (1998) . The Lucretius Poems (1998) Cape Enragé: Poems on a Raised Beach (2000) Yes, Yes, Yes! (2001) Orkney: October Diary (2002) Weathers: Poems New & Selected (2002) Fragmenta: 80 Wisdoms (2003) Midgic: A Place, a Poem (2003) That Place by Tantramar, Sackville, New Brunswick: Poems (2007) Love on the Marsh: A Long Poem (Sackville NB: Sybertooth, 2008) Looking into Trees (Sackville NB: Sybertooth, 2009) Letters from Helen, ed.(Sackville NB: Sybertooth, 2010)

Anthologies Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada, ed. Anne Compton, Laurence Hutchman, Ross Leckie and Robin McGrath (Goose Lane Editions, 2002)