Robert Bringhurst’s poetry, essays, and translations have won major awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris), and the Canada Council for the Arts. Many of his longer poems take the form of “chamber music for speaking voices” – polyphonic compositions that involve the interweaving of several simultaneous texts. His New World Suite No. 3, for example, is a poem for three speakers. His masque Ursa Major (which is set simultaneously in Saskatchewan and ancient Greece) is written for seven voices, speaking together in English, Latin, Greek, and Cree.
Trained as a linguist, Bringhurst has translated from several European, Asian, and Native American languages. His monumental study of Haida oral literature, A Story as Sharp as a Knife, is described by Margaret Atwood as “a profound meditation on the nature of oral poetry and myth.” The trilogy of which it forms a part was chosen as Book of the Year for 2004 by the Times of London.
“Bringhurst comes to us like night lightning,” Barry Lopez has written. “The dark is suddenly lit by language beautifully crafted and by riveting thought. He writes for the eye, the ear, and the mind all at once, and he doesn’t waste a sentence.”