A Kind of Perseverance
In A Kind of Perseverance Margaret Avison shares with readers two lectures she gave at the University of Waterloo in 1993 -- 'Misunderstanding is Damaging' and 'Understanding is Costly'. Thoughtfully and with precision she tells of her journey, often unfocussed, that led finally to the Christian conversion that is central to an understanding of her …
Always Now
Since childhood Margaret Avison has written poetry and published it. Always Now: The Collected Poems (three volumes), stretches from the 1930s to the twenty-first century, through Winter Sun in 1960 and Concrete and Wild Carrot in 2002 (winners, respectively, of the Governor-General's Award and the Griffin Prize for Poetry) to nineteen new poems se …
Concrete and Wild Carrot
In Margaret Avison’s new poems, little pleasures are bound up with larger ones. Her slightest subjects — beloved Toronto parks with their population of oaks, firs, squirrels, dogs, kids, even ants, and the minutest sighs of her contemporary urban soundscape — all have their being within an immense composition that calls and hauls us to a larg …
I Am Here and Not Not-There
'Margaret Avison was a highly regarded Canadian poet who saw poetry as her life's vocation but shied away from being publicly labelled a poet. She has been called reclusive, introspective; her poetry difficult and demanding. And yet, as shown by her enigmatically titled autobiography, I am Here and Not Not-There, she was also a woman with a lively …
Listening
A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
Margaret Avison was widely acknowledged as one of Canada’s foremost poets. Taut, sublime, subtle, and crystalline, the poems in her brilliant new collection, published posthumously, showcase Avison at her best, and constitute the final chapter in an extraordinary artistic legacy that spanned more than forty y …
August. Reading
From lamplight on a glossy page
my eyes lift: now not
insects’ footprints along
gleamy paper, but a
wash of diluted, cold
green tea with
dust-bunny clouds afloat
southward, grape-tinted once but
fast fading. A
last lick of
ivory light tinctures
a tall, very far over,
wall.
Momentary Dark
Margaret Avison has long been considered one of Canada’s most respected writers, and in a career that now spans more than forty years, she continues to work at the height of her powers. In this brilliant collection of new poems, Avison writes of our home on this “little rollicking orb,” exhilaratingly situated in the immensity of space, and o …
POLITICAL PLOY PERHAPS
Is
Humpty Dumpty a
was?
His all-apartity
awash
in royal horses?
(as likely to squash
that goggle-eyed face
in the grass as
to reass-
emble a torso from as
many bits as hash)?
Perhaps poor Humpty had
to tumble so we’d see
all the pieces we need
to make democracy.
A Word about the Poem by Margaret Avison
Three strands came together suddenly to release this poem: remembering Iona and Peter Opies’ disclosure, probably in The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, of a political dimension in nursery rhymes; recalling an illustration of Humpty Dumpty in a child’s book, his pudginess and protruding eyes, which merged with newspaper photographs of public figures; the feel in the fingers of the name “Humpty Dumpty,” wood carved in an irregularly rounded shape.
In a poem, the physical feel of a word-counter matters more than its meaning (in this instance, some significant person’s “fall” from power after perceived indecisiveness, i.e. “sat on a wall”).
More Joy in Heaven
Based on a real-life character, More Joy in Heaven is a gripping account of the tragic plight of young Kip Caley, a notorious bank-robber released early from prison and feted by society as a returning prodigal son.
Earnest, optimistic, and fired by reformist zeal, Kip eventually comes to realize that the welcome of his supporters is superficial and …
No Time
"Avison's new volume is a lyrical tribute to a created order suffused with a holy energy--a vitality inaccessible to the statisticians, the engineers, the corporate mandarins. It is not, however, a whimsical, Pollyanish ecstacy that sustains her, but a gritty religious vision grounded in our desperate humanity, the 'roped-in, rotten,/ welted and sw …
Not Yet But Still
"These new poems are about city stresses and weather, natural creatures, seasons of day and year, with a few glimpses from train windows. A few are vignettes and portraits--comic or sombre or fantastic--in our spoken language. There are meditations. There is one poem in the guise of a book review which wrestles with questions we all ask and none of …
Selected Poems
This is the first selection available in this country of the work of one of Canada's most distinguished writers. An introspective poet with roots in the metaphysical and meditational traditions, Margaret Avison's complex, original, and versatile poetry has had a vast influence on Canadianliterature and won her a host of domestic awards.
sunblue
"She is both abstract and concrete; she combines metaphysical speculation with acute observation; she sees things in their everyday detail and also in the context of eternity. She works at and teases the language, like a tangled skein of wool, to render these paradoxes in all the complexity of their ramifications." (Stephen Scobie)
The Essential Margaret Avison
The Essential Margaret Avison showcases the development of one of Canada's most brilliant and original poets, twice winner of the Governor-General's Award for Poetry. Margaret Avison's vibrant life work is distilled here into a selection that is illuminating, generous and richly varied.
All Fools' Eve
From rooming-house to rooming-house
The toasted evening spells
City to hayrick, warming and bewildering
A million motes. From gilded tiers,
Balconies, and sombre rows,
Women see gopher-hawks, and rolling flaxen hills;
Smell a lost childhood's homely supper.
Men lean with folded newspapers,
Touched by a mushroom and root-cellar
Coolness. The wind flows,
Ruffles, unquickens. Crumbling ash
Leaves the west chill. The Sticks-&-Stones, this City,
Lies funeral bare.
Over its gaping arches stares
That haunt, the mirror mineral.
In cribs, or propped at plastic tablecloths,
Children are roundeyed, caught by a cold magic,
Fading of glory. In their dim
Cement-floored garden the zoo monkeys shiver.
Doors slam. Lights snap, restore
The night's right prose.
Gradually
All but the lovers' ghostly windows close.