Lochhead, Douglas Grant

  • From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: See full biography at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Lochhead
  • Wiki Biography:
    • 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 (1974–76), 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.
    • Lochhead’s best-known book, High Marsh Road, a collection of 122 short poems chronicling his daily walks across the Tantramar Marshes in southeastern New Brunswick, earned him a nomination for a Governor General’s Award in 1980. In 2005, when High Marsh Road/La Strada di Tantramar was awarded the Carlo Betocchi International Poetry Prize, Lochhead became the first non-Italian writer to win it. 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. The first 30 poems in High Marsh Road are posted on telephone poles leading from Sackville’s main downtown intersection toward the marshes that so often stirred “the red sea of his singing”.
    • Douglas Lochhead left Massey College in 1975 to become Edgar and Dorothy Davidson Chair of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. He told an interviewer later that he spent his first two years teaching and finding a centre for the program. He also extended its curriculum and, as always, continued writing poetry inspired by the unique geography around Sackville. The town occupies uplands overlooking a broad expanse of tidal, saltwater marsh that has long inspired poets such as Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman. Lochhead first saw the Tantramar Marshes from a troop train on his way to England during the Second World War. After moving to Sackville, he visited them nearly every day where he watched the many flocks of migrating birds and closely observed the landscape that became an important subject for his poems.
  • Fourth Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=8655
  • Find A Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/175335736/douglas_grant-lochhead