Eyelands Book Awards, Finalist in Published Book Category for Dust Blown Side of the Journey, 2020
Arc Award of Awesomeness runner-up December 2020
National Broadsheet Contest Winner, League of Canadian Poets, 2019
The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest, Honourable Mention, 2019
Bridport Poetry Prize (UK) shortlist 2015, 2016 and 2019
Arc poem of the year shortlist 2015
Winston Collins Descant Prize for Best Canadian poem, Finalist 2012
The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest, Third Prize 2009
Alfred G. Bailey Award 2009
Earle Birney Prize 2008
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Dust blown side of the journey is a book of intimate, atmospheric poetry bursting with powerful imagery. Eleonore Schönmaier’s perspective brings everything so close that it feels as if we are seeing through the poet’s eyes. In Schönmaier’s minimal and meaningful poetry, intense emotion is lurking under the transparent surface of seemingly simple, everyday images. Dust blown side of the journey is a book that leaves its distinctly gentle yet deep mark on the reader’s mind.
—Andriana Minou
Judge of the Published Poetry Book Category
Eyelands Book Awards 2020 (Greece)
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There is a lot to admire about this piece. Physically on the page and in the words itself it carries and illustrates its central image. The reader is left haunted by this poem. It’s nature speaks to the sort of experiential empathy that would do much to our world…Its form on the page, its strong images, and captivating lyric voice will be well suited to the broadsheet format.
– D.A. Lockhart
Judge of the National Broadsheet Contest
League of Canadian Poets 2019
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The third prize winner is Eleonore Schonmaier of Ketch Harbour, Nova Scotia. Her three poems are presented with a simplicity which may conceal their arts of precision and radication. Each of the poems is set in a world we can readily recognize, at first, as real. As the poems proceed, this world changes into one where things become their own language, as they often do in dreams. The poems occur both at and beyond a threshold of discursive understanding. In that sense, they are acts of deep poetic cognition. They are given, not taken. The poet is not so much their contriver as their discoverer.
—Amanda Jernigan and Peter Sanger
Judges of The Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest
The Antigonish Review
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[The winning manuscript] is an original collection of poems filled with exotic landscapes and moving portraits. The poet takes us on unexpected journeys to unusual situations, using scientific, mathematical, musical, and literary metaphors… The poet creates poems woven with subtle arguments and brings the reader surprising, at times breathtaking, connections, writing from the unusual angles of fireflies, geodomes, x-rays. Satirical and humorous poems balance serious poems. Through a consciousness that we often ignore, the poet illuminates life in highly original ways. In [the winning manuscript] the reader is challenged to enter different realities and to explore these through the unfolding of possibilities.
—Laurence Hutchman
Judge of the Alfred G. Bailey Award
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Eleonore Schönmaier [is] the author of “Sidereal Time”…It is gratifying to see such talent as Eleonore’s rewarded, through blind judging, in competition with some of the best writers in the country and beyond. Thumbing through her stack of fifteen finalists, [judge] Helen [Humphreys] pulled out Eleonore’s “Sidereal Time” and said “Great title!”…a rich vein of imagery, as Eleonore tilts the frame of our perception just enough to challenge and delight. Quiet, aphoristic, hers is the cool subversive language of plants and constellations.
—Richard Cumyn
Sheldon Currie Fiction Contest
The Antigonish Review
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