Cold Comfort

When his father died, award-winning poet Gil McElroy was given a box of photographs that documented his father's work on the Canadian military's northern Distant Early Warning Line in the 1950s. Image by image, McElroy attempts to come to terms with the mysterious photographer, a man better understood by his military compatriots than by his own family. Photographs and text add to the scant documentation of building Canada's DEW Line defense network. Gil McElroy's poetry won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award in 2002. His essay on bpNichol's visual poetry won the Christina Sabat Award for Art Criticism in 2001.