In 2005, when High Marsh Road/La Strada di Tantramar was awarded the Carlo Betocchi International Poetry Prize, Lochhead became the first non-Italian writer to win it.

[5][6] He also received the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English-language Literary Arts in 2001 and the following year, became the first poet laureate for the town of Sackville, New Brunswick, where he had lived since joining the faculty at Mount Allison University in 1975.

[2][8] "I think Douglas thought of poetry as a form of resistance," his friend and fellow poet Peter Sanger told The Globe and Mail following Lochhead's death in 2011.

The family moved the next year when Grant Lochhead landed a job as Dominion Agricultural Biologist at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa.

[8][9] Lochhead's mother, Helen Van Wart, was an accomplished pianist and piano teacher who was born in Saint John, New Brunswick.

"I was rushed to Fredericton at the age of two or three months to be baptized," Lochhead told an interviewer in 1988, adding that the ceremony took place in the home of his maternal grandparents.

As a result of his mother's Maritime roots, Lochhead spent his boyhood summers at Duck Cove, near Saint John on the Bay of Fundy.

The brothers spent most of their holidays together in New Brunswick and shared a fascination with their parents' forested cottage property on the Gatineau River north of Hull, Quebec.

Kenneth, who became one of Canada's foremost painters, recalled how his family loved the natural beauty of the place: "My mother didn’t want anything cut; the trillium would come up, and that was a sacred rite of spring...And my brother looking at birds and mother waiting for certain birds to appear; these images were poignant in the excitement of their experience and connection."

[9][10][11] In 1939, Douglas Lochhead enrolled in the pre-medical program at McGill University following in the scientific footsteps of his microbiologist father and his paternal grandfather William Lochhead who taught botany, genetics, geology and zoology at Macdonald College in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, and who, in 1908, had founded the Quebec Society for the Protection of Plants from Insects and Fungous Diseases.

Douglas Lochhead remembered spending many enjoyable hours in his grandfather's library reading his scientific papers, his collection of 19th century poetry and books by authors ranging from Darwin to Dickens.

[4][9] His experiences in the Canadian military formed the basis for his 1984 book, The Panic Field: Prose Poems in which he explores "the ways of men, caught up in the sprawling net of the army.

"[8] Douglas Lochhead left Massey College in 1975 to become Edgar and Dorothy Davidson Chair of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.

The town occupies uplands overlooking a broad expanse of tidal, saltwater marsh that has long inspired poets such as Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman.

After moving to Sackville, he visited them nearly every day where he watched the many flocks of migrating birds and closely observed the landscape that became an important subject for his poems.

"[1][8][17] When his wife, Jean, died of cancer in 1991, Lochhead elegized her in the sequence Black Festival (1991) and in “Elegies 1-10,” which appeared in Homage to Henry Alline & Other Poems (1992).

He was named Sackville's first poet laureate in 2002 in recognition of his status as a writer whose work reflected an intense interest in and sensitivity to local places.