Barbara Nickel's The Gladys Elegies (Coteau Books) was the deserving winner of this year's Pat Lowther Memorial Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. Although there are many things I'd rather do than read sonnets, Nickel's subtle and delicate elegies won me over.

Her writing flows with the certainty of that fish tail you're always drawn to in an aquarium, the one that makes you feel as if you've gone somewhere even when you've been standing still.