Desire Never Leaves
The Poetry of Tim Lilburn
- Publisher
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Initial publish date
- Aug 2009
- Category
- Canadian, Inspirational & Religious, Literary
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9780889205406
- Publish Date
- Aug 2009
- List Price
- $11.99
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780889205147
- Publish Date
- Dec 2006
- List Price
- $21.99
Add it to your shelf
Where to buy it
Description
The selected poems in Desire Never Leaves span Tim Lilburn’s career, demonstrating the evolution of a unique and careful thinker as he takes his place among the nation’s premier writers. This edition of his poetry untangles many of the strands running through his works, providing insight into a poetic world that is both spectacular and humbling.
The introduction by Alison Calder situates Lilburn’s writing in an alternate tradition of prairie poetry that relies less on the vernacular and more on philosophy and meditation. Examining Lilburn’s antecedents in Christian mysticism and the ascetic tradition, Calder stresses the paradoxical nature of Lilburn’s writing—the expression of loss through plenitude. The divine in the natural world is glimpsed in brief flashes; nevertheless, the poet, driven by love, continues his quest for what glitters in things.
Tim Lilburn’s afterword is an evocative meditation grounded in personal history. He speaks of how poetry, a craning quiet, allows one to hear what is alive in the world. He also describes how poetry is resolutely attached to both a historical moment and an individual subjectivity that is inevitably anchored in time. Lilburn’s poetry is both a religious undertaking and a political gesture that speaks to the urgency of situating ourselves where we live.
About the authors
Alison Calder’s first poetry collection, Wolf Tree, won two Manitoba Book Awards and was a finalist for both the Gerald Lampert Award and the Pat Lowther Award for Canadian poetry. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies, most notably Breathing Fire:Canada’s New Poets and Exposed, and has twice circulated on Winnipeg city buses.She is the editor of Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007) and a critical edition of Frederick Philip Grove’s 1924 novel Settlers of the Marsh (Borealis, 2006), and the co-editor of History, Literature, and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies (University of Manitoba Press, 2005).Born in England, Alison Calder grew up in Saskatoon and now lives in Winnipeg, where she teaches Canadian Literature and creative writing at the University of Manitoba.
Tim Lilburn was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. He has published eight books of poetry, including To the River, Kill-site, and Orphic Politics. His work has received the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry for Kill-site and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award (for To the River), among other prizes. Lilburn has produced two essay collections, both concerned with poetics, eros, and politics, Living in the World as if It Were Home and Going Home, and edited two other collections on poetics, Poetry and Knowing and Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy. He was a participant in the 2008 Pamirs Poetry Journey. Lilburn teaches at the University of Victoria.
Excerpt: Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn (edited by Alison Calder; by (author) Tim Lilburn)
Contemplation Is Mourning by Tim Lilburn
You lie down in the deer's bed.
It is bright with the undersides of grass revealed by her weight during the
length of her sleep. No one comes here; grass hums
because the body's touched it. Aspen leaves below you sour like horses
after a run. There are snowberries, fescue.
This is the edge of the known world and the beginning of philosophy.
Looking takes you so far on a leash of delight, then removes it and says
the price of admission to further is your name. Either the desert
and winter
of what the deer is in herself or a palace life disturbed by itches and
sounds
felt through the gigantic walls. Choose.
Light comes through pale trees as mind sometimes kisses the body.
The hills are the bones of hills.
The deer cannot be known. She is the Atlantic, she is Egypt, she is
the night where her names go missing, to walk into her oddness is
; to feel severed, sick, darkened, ashamed.
Her body is a border crossing, a wall and a perfume and past this
she is infinite. And it is terrible to enter this.
You lie down in the deer's bed, in the green martyrion, the place where
language buries itself, waiting place, weem.
You will wait. You will lean into the darkness of her absent
body. You will be shaved and narrowed by the barren strangeness of the
deer, the wastes of her oddness. Snow is coming. Light is cool,
nearly drinkable; from grass protrudes the hard, lost
smell of last year's melted snow.
Editorial Reviews
''Readers are bound to appreciate Lilburn's collection, not to mention the welcome inclusion of his afterword which reads like a biography, an essay and a meditation on the quiet power of poetry.''
Canadian Literature, Number 195, Winter 2007
''A welcome and strongly recommended introduction to one of Canada's best poets.''
Midwest Book Review, February 2007
''The quest for a wider audience for poetry may be quixotic, but this series makes a serious attempt to present attractive, affordable selections that speak to contemporary interests and topics that might engage a younger generation of readers. Yet it does not condescend, preferring to provide substantial and sophisticated poets to these new readers. At the very least, these slim volumes will make very useful introductory teaching texts in post-secondary classrooms because they whet the appetite without overwhelming.''
Canadian Literature, 193, Summer 2007
''Desire Never Leaves ... is an excellent explanatory introduction to Lilburn's craft, Catholicism, and Prairie mysticism, thanks in part to one of Lilburn's own essays that serves as a postface.''
Seven Oaks, May 2007
''[T]he introduction and afterword helped me to understand my own responses better, sharpened my appreciation for a poetry that allures and eludes at the same time.... Lilburn writes this section [the Afterword] with panache, challenging the ordinary and humdrum way of seeing the world.''
Journal of Canadian Poetry, January 2009
''Lilburn stands in awe of, and has come as close as humanly possible to capturing, the magnitude and magnificence of creation.''
Arc Poetry Magazine, Volum 61, Winter 2009
