Drive

Winner of the Acorn-Plantos Award

Winner of the Hamilton Literary Award, Poetry

In sure and tender poetry, Chris Pannell looks into the rearview mirror of his bus?and his life?to celebrate the humanity of his passengers, and himself. From speaking with kidney dialysis patients, to driving sleeping teenagers home, Pannell’s poems engage the reader with his empathic view of our world in elegantly constructed verse.

AUTHOR

Chris Pannell

Chris Pannell serves on the board of Hamilton’s annual gritLIT Literary Festival. He has published three poetry books: Under Old Stars, Sorry I Spent Your Poem and Drive. He is also the author of a set of three poetry broadsheets entitled, Fractures, Subluxations and Disclocations, which won the Hamilton & Region Arts Council poetry book award in 1997. From 1993 until 2005 he ran the New Writing Workshop at Hamilton Artists Inc. and edited two book-lengh anthologies for the group. He has been published in literary magazines across Canada and internationally as well.

Reviews

“Readers can’t help but fall in love with the people Pannell observes along his various routes.” – H Magazine

“There are beautifully rendered stories of the passengers he drives, often interwoven with other observations, some of the very casual, minute and fleeting but leading in their meandering way to thoughts on larger themes.” – The Hamilton Spectator

“In these poems, Pannell as driver witnesses the struggles of his passenger’s quiet lives and tries to adjust the mechanisms that leave them vulnerable, dislocated from company, desperate and alone?The youthful, aged and ill travellers need their poet, and Pannell takes on this role.” – Journal of Canadian Poetry