In Memoriam

The League of Canadian Poets has a large community that has stood strong for over 50 years. Over these past few months, the League has lost members and friends from the poetry community. We’d like to take this chance to remember Daniel David Moses and Barbara Myers.

Barbara Myers

Barbara Myers grew up in Halifax’s North End, and worked at odd jobs to help put herself through school. She was a reporter for the Halifax Mail-Star and Chronicle-Herald and a writer-researcher for the Royal Commission on the Status of Women and the LeDain Inquiry into Non-Medical Drug Use, before settling into many years of communications consulting for the government in Toronto and Ottawa.

Since the late 1990s, Myers had published widely in journals and anthologies, and had won literary prizes including Other Voices (first place, 2000) as well as Arc’s Poem of the Year (HM, in 2006). For six years, she worked as an associate editor at Arc, Canada’s National Poetry Magazine, to which she continued to regularly contribute reviews and essays. She had published a number of chapbooks, both her own and collections compiled from the work of students in a poetry group she facilitated. A community activist, she lived in Ottawa, where she regularly volunteered for the Ottawa International Writers’ Festival.

Barbara passed away on Mother’s Day, May 10, 2020 after a lengthy and heroic battle with cancer. She was art, love, passion, beauty and intelligence.

Born a Roberts (Cashmore) of father Lawrence Ernest and Jean Muriel (Nickerson) in North Halifax, Nova Scotia, she earned scholarships, quickly excelled academically and began a professional and artistic career in communications.

The art and beauty of the written word, created or consumed, was an integral part of Barbara’s identity and life journey. A journalist, teacher, philosopher, public servant, volunteer, editor and published poet were some of the mantels she wore, all tempered with her strong advocacy for justice, fairness, respect

and equity. As she stretched professionally, her love for, and dedication to her family remained at her core. Predeceased by her parents and sister Laurel Diane Roberts, Barbara is survived by her sister Judy Kane (Roberts), brother David (Darlene) Roberts, her children Craig (Kym Newhook) Myers, Rod (Janet) Myers, Lesley (Neil) Mather, and Melissa (Todd) Baseden, her grandchildren Jesse and Leah Kane, Phoebe Newhook, Julian Myers, Aaron and Evelyn Myers, Jordan and Rosheen King, Kyleigh Baseden, and the father of her children Brian Myers (Marilyn) and extended family.

Daniel David Moses

Playwright and poet Daniel David Moses, a groundbreaking voice for Indigenous writers in Canada, has died. Queen’s University, where Moses was a professor emeritus, confirmed this with CBC Books.

He died on Monday, July 13. He was 68 years old.

Moses was born on Feb. 18, 1952. Moses, who was Delaware, grew up on a dairy farm on Six Nations of the Grand River in southern Ontario.

Moses would get his undergraduate degree at York University and would go on to receive his MFA from the University of British Columbia. “My father joked that I only got an education so that I could escape the hard work of farming,” Moses told Shelagh Rogers on The Next Chapter in 2013.

He was curious about the world and about words from a young age. “My perceptions of the world are very formed by wanting to know how it all makes sense, this reality we live in. I was a kid who read a lot of science fiction, so I’m also very much formed by the knowledge that our culture has gained through science, that practice that doesn’t address the spiritual. There is still mystery.”

Over the course of more than 30 years, he would write more than a dozen plays and four poetry collections.

He published his first poem in 1974 and would go on to publish four collections throughout his career: Delicate Bodies, The White Line, Sixteen Jesuses and A Small Essay on the Largeness of Light and Other Poems.

His poetry also appeared in journals and magazines like Exile, Prairie Fire, Impulse and the Fiddlehead.

He also published an essay collection called Pursued by a Bear: Talks, Monologues and Tales.