published her first short story, "Heat", in the Canadian Mercury at the same age (in January, 1929). Her second book of poems, Signpost (1932), "showed the increasing sophistication of her imagist skills, as in 'Green rain', and an original sense of feminine sexuality." When her Selected Poems were published in 1956, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye said of them: Miss Livesay is an imagist who started off, in Green Pitcher (1929), in the Amy Lowell idiom.... With Day and Night (1944) a social passion begins to fuse the diction, tighten the rhythm, and concentrate the imagery.... From "Prelude for Spring" on, the original imagist texture gradually returns.... The basis of Miss Livesay's imagery is the association between winter and the human death-impulse and between spring and the human capacity for life. Cutting across this is the irony of the fact that spring tends to obliterate the memory of winter, whereas human beings enjoying love and peace retain an uneasy sense of the horrors of hatred and war.... The dangers of imagism are facility and slackness, and one reads through this book with mixed feelings. But it is one of the few rewards of writing poetry that the poet takes his ranking from his best work. Miss Livesay's most distinctive quality, I think, is her power of observing how other people observe, especially children. Too often her own observation goes out of focus, making the love poems elusive and the descriptive ones prolix, but in the gentle humour of 'The Traveller,' in 'The Child Looks Out,' in 'On Seeing,' in the nursery-rhyme rhythm of 'Abracadabra,' and in many other places, we can see what Professor Desmond Pacey means by "a voice we delight to hear." Awards and honours Livesay won the Governor General's Award, Canada's top poetry honour, twice: in 1944 for Day and Night, and in 1947 for Poems for People. The Royal Society of Canada elected her as a Fellow, and awarded her its Lorne Pierce Medal, in 1947. Livesay also won the Queen's Canada Medal in 1977, and the Persons Case Award for the Status of Women in 1984. In 1983 she was made a Doctor of Athabasca University and in 1987 she became an Officer of the Order of Canada. Livesay was awarded the Order of British Columbia in 1992. The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize is a category of the BC Book Prizes that is awarded to