Landmark poet wins literary award

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This article was published 15/10/2023 (959 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sarah Ens is the recipient of a literary award for her latest book.

The Landmark native is a poet that has used her personal experience and that of her grandmother’s to create a richly woven long-form poem entitled Flyway.

Published by Turnstone Press, Flyway takes the fragile landscape of the tall grass prairie and braids it with the personal story of her grandmother who immigrated to Manitoba from the Ukraine following the Second World War.

“This was a really formative story for me growing up. I guess after she passed away, I became really even more interested in trying to understand it and get a fuller idea of what it was that she went through and those memories and the way that memories are inherited and the stories that she passed down to me, and how they shaped my sense of myself and my family, and where I come from and what home means. It’s that home link that for me braid those two threads together,” said Ens.

Flyway was the winner of the 2022 ReLit award for Poetry and shortlisted for the Margaret McWilliams Award in the category of popular history and shortlisted for a McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award at the Manitoba Book Awards.

“It’s really moving for me. I feel really grateful and honoured. This story which is so personal to me and which I really poured my heart into it. It means a lot for us to have that story and connect to other people. I’m just really grateful,” she said.

Ens chose to tell the story in a long form format because it’s “a bit complicated and a bit convoluted.”

“I wanted to tell this narrative and part of the book is in my Oma’s first-person voice as she travels, her experiences from Ukraine to Manitoba, and some of the things she goes through on that journey.

“I didn’t want it to be a straightforward novel. I didn’t want to write it in prose. I’m really interested in that poetry can invite questions and use repetition and be a little more circuitous,returning again and again to certain memories. And suggest that the way memories work, especially memories of trauma, are very cyclical they can repeat. It’s not so much moving from point A to point B by the long poem form allows you to take these different routes to circle around a central idea.”

Ens started working on Flyway in 2018 as her thesis project for her master’s. It was published by Turnstone in 2022.

“All in all, it was four years. It was an intensive process for sure,” she said.

Flyway is Ens’ second book of poetry. Her first book, The World is Mostly Sky, was a collection that came out in 2020. It was shortlisted for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year and the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. It won the Word Guild Award, general market specialty book.

“When I’m looking for images, or really strong descriptions, or effective stories, I tend to pull from my own memory bank. I do think that’s where I can find the strongest images to pull from. Writing from my own perspective felt like a leap for me. My first collection was very much pulled from my own experiences. In Flyway, I’m writing about things I had to research a lot and look at images and read letters in order to try and imagine what it would be like to grow up in a village in the Ukraine in the 1920s and ‘30s. So that felt like a bit of a step outside. But that being said, it’s a personal story in my life and it’s still very much in my family. I think I’m curious about writing from other perspectives, but it’s most natural for me to hue pretty close.”

Ens is a talented poet having been first published in Poetry is Dead Magazine at 22. Her poem, #teenroadkill, centered on the theme of teenage angst and her memories of growing up. She has been writing poems since she was 12 years old. She got her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and her master’s from the University of Saskatchewan. She currently works at the University of Manitoba Press as a sales and marketing supervisor. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Fire, Arc, Contemporary Verse 2, Room, and SAD.

Poetry for Ens is a way of processing a memory or a feeling in order to better understand it. What inspires her is learning about something, like the tall grass prairie in Flyway, and she wants to encourage other people to look at it the way she does. She also gets inspiration from other writers.

“I also get really inspired when I read the work of other writers. For Flyway in particular, Blue Marrow by Louise Halfe was really inspiring to me as well as a lot of work by other Mennonite poets and Canadian prairie poets like Patrick Friesen’s The Shunning was inspirational as well,” she said.