Listening
The Last Poems of Margaret Avison
- Publisher
- McClelland & Stewart
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2009
- Category
- Canadian, Women Authors, General
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780771008863
- Publish Date
- Mar 2009
- List Price
- $17.99
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Description
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 years.
About the author
One of Canada's most respected poets, Margaret Avison was born in Galt, Ontario, lived in Western Canada in her childhood, and then in Toronto. In a productive career that stretched back to the 1940s, she produced seven books of poems, including her first collection, Winter Sun (1960), which she assembled in Chicago while she was there on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and which won the Governor General's Award. No Time (Lancelot Press), a work that focussed on her interest in spiritual discovery and moral and religious values, also won the Governor General's Award for 1990. Avison's published poetry up to 2002 was gathered into Always Now: the Collected Poems (Porcupine's Quill, 2003), including Concrete and Wild Carrot which won the 2003 Griffin Prize. Her most recent book, Listening, Last Poems, was published in 2009 by McClelland & Stewart.
Margaret Avison was the recipient of many awards including the Order of Canada and three honorary doctorates.
Excerpt: Listening: The Last Poems of Margaret Avison (by (author) Margaret Avison)
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.
Editorial Reviews
"The radiant authority of Avison’s art, everywhere on display in this affective as well as effective volume, derives from a life spent observing, assimilating, listening and, most crucially, taking note of all that fills her senses. She opens her heart to the universe and, in so doing, finds fulfilment within its wondrous and often incomprehensibly wicked ways."
— Judith Fitzgerald, Globe and Mail
Other titles by
The Research Compendium
Review and Abstracts of Graduate Research, 1942-1962
The Research Compendium
Review and Abstracts of Graduate Research, 1942-1962
The Essential Margaret Avison
A Kind of Perseverance
I Am Here and Not Not-There
More Joy in Heaven
Writing the Terrain
Travelling Through Alberta with the Poets
Always Now
Concrete and Wild Carrot
