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.

Douglas Lochhead was born March 25, 1922, in Guelph, Ontario, where his father, Allan Grant Lochhead, worked as a microbiologist and research scientist at the Malt Products Company of Canada.

The family moved the next year when Grant Lochhead landed a job as Dominion Agricultural Biologist at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa.

Lochhead's mother, Helen Van Wart, was an accomplished pianist and piano teacher who was born in Saint John, New Brunswick.

Lochhead's only sibling, Kenneth was born in 1926.

The brothers spent most of their holidays together in New Brunswick and shared a fascination with their parents' forested cottage property on the Gatineau River north of Hull, Quebec.

Kenneth, who became one of Canada's foremost painters, recalled how his family loved the natural beauty of the place: "My mother didn’t want anything cut; the trillium would come up, and that was a sacred rite of spring...And my brother looking at birds and mother waiting for certain birds to appear; these images were poignant in the excitement of their experience and connection."

Over the years, Douglas Lochhead wrote several poems set in the Gatineau, while Kenneth painted a series of landscapes there.

Lochhead's last collection Looking into Trees includes poems inspired by his brother's paintings which are also reproduced in the book.

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.

Lochhead completed his pre-medical Bachelor of Arts degree in 1943 and was accepted into medicine.

But instead Lochhead joined the Canadian Army.

He received training first, as an artillery officer, and then, in the infantry.

He attained the rank of lieutenant, but the Second World War ended in Europe before he could be sent to the front.

He then volunteered to fight in the Pacific War, but it too ended before he could be trained as a paratrooper.

He wrote his thesis on the British poets of the First World War earning his Master's degree in 1947.

After graduating from the U. of T., Douglas Lochhead drifted here and there from a job as an advertising copywriter to work as a government information officer.

In 1948, he met Jean St. Clair Beckwith, a native of Cape Breton who was working as a librarian at the Toronto Public Library.

They married the next year and at her suggestion, Lochhead enrolled at McGill University where he received his Bachelor of Library Science in 1951.

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.

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.

After he became Davidson Chair of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison in 1975, Lochhead continued writing and publishing his many collections of poetry.

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.

His experiences in the Canadian military formed the basis for his 1984 book, The Panic Field: Prose Poems in which he explores "the ways of men, caught up in the sprawling net of the army."

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.

"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.

"[F]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."

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".

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.

"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[f] resistance to non-poetic thinking, to tyranny, to unimaginative views of the world."

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.