Douglas Lochhead

Douglas Lochhead
Douglas Lochhead in 2008
Born	March 25, 1922 (1922-03-25) Guelph, Ontario
Died	March 15, 2011(2011-03-15) (aged 88) Sackville, New Brunswick
Occupation	Poet, bibliographer, librarian, professor
Citizenship	Canadian
Alma mater	McGill University
Genre	Poetry
Notable works	High Marsh Road, Dykelands, Love on the Marsh
Spouse	Jean St. Clair Beckwith (1924-1991)

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. 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. 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. In 2005, when High Marsh Road/La Strada di Tantramar was awarded the International Poetry Prize, Lochhead became the first non-Italian writer to win it. 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".

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