Sue Goyette

Sue Goyette (born April 4, 1964, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada) is a Canadian poet and novelist who believes that each individual has a relationship with the vast and ancient wildernesses we often neglect—oceans, forests, plains, and prairies—and these provide some of the major themes she explores in her poetry. A nominee for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, winner of the Pat Lowther Award and the Atlantic Poetry Prize, and finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, Goyette is among the most distinctive voices in contemporary Canadian poetry.

Early work

Goyette’s first book of poetry, The True Names of Birds (1998), presents highly domestic scenes. Referring to children and parents, Goyette describes moments in their lives that, while sometimes rushed and routine, are ultimately grounded in a sense of wonder at the natural world:

With my daughter came promises and vows
that unfolded through time like a roadmap and led me
to myself as a child, filled with wonder for my father
who could make sound from a wide blade of grass

The True Names of Birds was nominated for the 1999 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther Award, and the Gerald Lampert Award.

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Set in Beaumont, Quebec, Lures (2002) is Goyette’s first novel. In it children from two troubled, unconventional families—an obsessive, neat-freak mother, a father who stalks boys, a lost pothead brother—suffer under the strain of unresolved pain and unspoken love. Each of the children finds solace in different ways, but it is only when the brother’s suicide causes their worlds to collapse that redemption can be had. Met with critical acclaim, Lures was nominated for the 1999 Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award.

Mid-career

Goyette’s 2004 poetry collection Undone is divided into three sections: “Forgotten” deals with the aftermath of a marriage breakup; “Kindred” pays homage to other artists; and “Apprentice” celebrates beginning anew. “A Version of Courage” poignantly describes the seismic nature of human pain:

Heartbreak is a geological occurrence. It takes years. Seams, faults
have slowly broken our days apart, their history dates all the way back to the ocean floor.

Undone was nominated for the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award, and the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry.

Goyette’s Outskirts (2011), on the other hand, combines prose and verse poems with the natural world used to describe domestic life. In “New Mothers,” for instance, a witty, ironic attitude expresses the paradoxical pressures placed on mothers:

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The whole planet is at the window peering in
while the new mothers sit on the side of the bed.
They have to be wolves; they have to be golden-winged
warblers. Reminders, reminders.

A new kind of narrative

Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, Sue Goyette’s fourth collection, Ocean (2013), presents a new kind of narrative. Like children counting waves before plunging into the changing tides, here the poems have numbers as titles, allowing readers to immerse themselves in the experience of each poem as related in sequence and theme to the one that precedes it. In “Eight,” Goyette’s potent use of personification warns of the ocean’s threatening response to our destructive behaviours:

The ocean’s culinary taste
was growing more sophisticated and occasionally
its appetite was unwieldy. It ate boats and children,
the occasional shoe. Pants. A diamond ring.
Hammers. It ate promises and rants.

Goyette believes the ocean’s enormity can humble and teach us our rightful place in the world. In the book-length poem Penelope: In First Person (2017), she retells Homer’s Odyssey from the perspective of Odysseus’s wife. Antithesis: A Memoir appeared in 2020.

Teaching

Goyette has taught at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Sage Hill Experience, and the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University.

The original version of this entry was published by The Canadian Encyclopedia .