The Essential Margaret Avison (Essential Poets)($12.95Value)

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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. If beauty, as Alfred North Whitehead defines it, is a quality which finds its exemplification in actual occasions, and if beauty is more completely exemplified in imperfection and discord than in the perfection of harmony, then Margaret Avison s Concrete and Wild Carrot is an occasion of beauty. Avison s poetry is also alive in its sublimity and its humility: wonder, readiness, simplicity the gifts of perception Avison attributes to her Christian faith imbue every poem in this book with a rare spirit of disorderly love. Margaret Avison is a national treasure. For many decades she has forged a way to write, against the grain, some of the most humane, sweet and profound poetry of our time. --Griffin Prize Citation `If beauty, as Alfred North Whitehead defines it, is `a quality which finds its exemplification in actual occasions,' and if beauty is more completely exemplified in `imperfection and discord' than in the `perfection of harmony,' then Margaret Avison's Concrete and Wild Carrot is an occasion of beauty. Avison's poetry is also alive in its sublimity and its humility: `wonder, readiness, simplicity' -- the gifts of perception Avison attributes to her Christian faith -- imbue every poem in this book with a rare spirit of disorderly love. Margaret Avison is a national treasure. For many decades she has forged a way to write, against the grain, some of the most humane, sweet and profound poetry of our time.' -- Griffin Prize Judges' Citation 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 spirit 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.