Pat Lowther


Patricia Louise Lowther was a Canadian poet. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, she grew up in the neighboring city of North Vancouver.

Life

When she was ten years old, her first published poem appeared in The Vancouver Sun.
It wasn't until 1968 that she published her first collection, This Difficult Flowring, with Very Stone House, a small Canadian poetry press. In 1972, "The Age of the Bird", a long poem inspired by revolutionary politics in South America, was published as a broadside by Blackfish Press. Its companion poem, "Regard to Neruda", was written for Pablo Neruda, one of Lowther's political and literary inspirations.
She was co-chair of the League of Canadian Poets, and the BC Arts Council. She was about to begin her first teaching term as a Creative Writing sessional at the University of British Columbia when she was murdered.
Milk Stone, published in 1974 by Borealis Press, became Lowther's breakthrough into Canadian mainstream literature. A Stone Diary was submitted to Oxford University Press in 1975.
In September 1975, Lowther was reported missing after failing to arrive for a scheduled poetry reading at Vancouver's Ironworkers Hall. Three weeks later, her body was found in Furry Creek near Squamish, British Columbia. Her second husband Roy Lowther, whom she had married in 1963, was convicted of the murder in June 1977. He died in Matsqui prison in Abbotsford, British Columbia, on July 14, 1985.
Her daughters are the poet Christine Lowther, Beth Lowther, and Kathy Lyons. Her son is Alan Domphousse.

Legacy

Two years after the poet's murder, Oxford published A Stone Diary. In 1980, a collection of Lowther's early and unpublished poems, Final Instructions, was also published. Also that year, the League of Canadian Poets established the Pat Lowther Award, a prize awarded annually to a book of poetry by a Canadian woman.
A manuscript was discovered in 1996 and published under the title Time Capsule.
Lowther's life and death have served to inspire a number of works, including her daughter Christine Lowther's first poetry collection, New Power, and the novels by Carol Shields and Furry Creek by Keith Harrison.

Awards