Article

Joyce Anne Marriott

Published Online February 10, 2008

Last Edited March 7, 2014

Joyce Anne Marriott, poet (b at Victoria 5 Nov 1913; d 1997). Marriott was a productive poet and poetry-educator in the 1940s, when she was also on the board of the famous pioneer literary magazine CONTEMPORARY VERSE and otherwise active as an editor.

Marriott, Joyce Anne

Joyce Anne Marriott, poet (b at Victoria 5 Nov 1913; d 1997). Marriott was a productive poet and poetry-educator in the 1940s, when she was also on the board of the famous pioneer literary magazine CONTEMPORARY VERSE and otherwise active as an editor. She was renowned especially for the narrative poem "The Wind, Our Enemy." Her best-known collection was Sandstone and Other Poems (1945), though one of her earlier ones, Calling Adventurers (1941), won the Governor General's Award. After the war, Marriott stopped writing, only to return eventually with Countries (1971), The Circular Coast: Poems New and Selected (1981), A Long Way to Oregon: Selected Short Stories (1984) and Letters from Some Island: New Poems (1985). She thus proved herself a hardy survivor of the gifted generation of poets whose leading lights were and remain figures such as Earle BIRNEY and Irving LAYTON.