The Essential Margaret Avison
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Here, one can experience Avison’s dazzling diction (‘‘a saucepantilt of water,’’ ‘‘birds clotted in big trees’’), her metaphoric and tonal complexities, and her quiet examination of the world in which she lived. The Essential Margaret Avison also traces her movement from skeptical intellectual to committed Christian.
Though some scholars have dismissed her later religious poetry as simplistic and inferior to her earlier work, the truth is more complex, and the line between what is religious and what is not in Avison’s poetry is difficult to draw. Robyn Sarah describes how Avison’s work became ‘‘more and more a poetry of inquiry, an inner pondering of her daily givens,’’ in which her experience of the worldly and the transcendent are inextricably tied.
Margaret Avison, honoured by the Griffin Prize and twice by the Governor-General’s Award, was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1985, and died, at the age of 89, in 2007. This singular poet’s legacy is well represented in Robyn Sarah’s thoughtfully chosen selection.
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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.
Robyn Sarah was born in New York City to Canadian parents, and has lived for most of her life in Montréal. A graduate of McGill University (where she majored in philosophy and English) and of Québec’s Conservatoire de Musique et d’Art Dramatique, she is the author of seven poetry collections and one previous collection of short stories, A Nice Gazebo, published by Véhicule in 1992. The same year, Anansi published The Touchstone: Poems New and Selected, a collection of her poetry spanning twenty years. Robyn Sarah has also recently published a collection of her essays on poetry, entitled Little Eurekas.
