Margaret Avison
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.






Listening
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.

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”).

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.


Writing the Terrain

Writing the Terrain

