Tim Lilburn – författare

From Governor General''s Award-winning poet Tim Lilburn comes a new collection of poetry of great scope and ambition. The Names is personal and familial archaeology, an extemporal dig giving spectres back to their bodies. With its lines sped up and dazzlingly associative, Tim Lilburn’s cocktail of obsessions – confession, ontology, mystical theology, humour and extreme, fleet, apt weirdness – marches through on full display. He pulls in an even broader cast of characters than his previous collections managed: John Ruusbroec and Marguerite Porete brush past aunts, uncles, and unusual creatures steering the boats of language past fog-draped trees. In Lilburn’s latest collection, we are immersed in a realism of remarkable proportions, as though incandescent memory comprised both texture and text, and combined formed the elemental fibres of a perilous present.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Louis Riel prophesied that a polyglot Métis nation would rise on the prairies five hundred years after his death, and that it would be called by the "joyous name" of the House of Charlemagne. This new polity would be built on the principles of Riel's Massinahican , a radical philosophical system which now survives only in fragments. Its hallmarks would be justice, ontological accord, and the blurring of all separations dividing women and men, the earth and human beings. The House of Charlemagne tracks the birth of this ideal nation in the burning imagination of the young settler Henry Jackson, who took the name Honoré Jaxon after his encounter with Riel's vision. Commissioned by Edward Poitras as a text for dancers, Tim Lilburn's poem gives voice and body to Riel's prescient metaphysics. As the Jury citation said of his Governor General's Award winning Kill-Site, "Lilburn's work is richly figurative, but firmly rooted in colloquial speech. He is not only a virtuoso at the linguistic level, taking risks with metaphor and line, but also steeped in a metaphysics of place."

A new collection by the winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Tim Lilburn’s award-winning work has observed the natural world with an intensity of seeing and a reverence that shifts the way we understand our lives. Now, in his brilliant new collection of poems, Lilburn has turned his meticulous, unerring eye to an intimate, utterly compelling exploration of the body’s fall into illness. These haunting poems take the reader below the surface of things into a peculiar world of personal and social alteration. Its incantatory insistence and its shocking imagistic leaps make the poetry a sustained act of therapy, a ritual instrument for change.From the Trade Paperback edition.

This volume, the final in Tim Lilburn’s decades-long meditation on philosophy and environmental consequences, traces a relationship between mystic traditions and the political world. Struck by the realization that he did not know how to be where he found himself, Lilburn embarked on a personal attempt at decolonization, seeking to uncover what is wrong within Canadian culture and to locate a possible path to recovery. He proposes a new epistemology leading to an ecologically responsible and spiritually acute relationship between settler Canadians, Indigenous peoples, and the land we inhabit. The Larger Conversation is a bold statement: a vital text for readers of environmental philosophy and for anyone interested in building toward conversation between Indigenous peoples and settlers.

With Numinous Seditions, celebrated poet and essayist Tim Lilburn investigates inner dispositions that might help us bear the new sorrows of the climate crisis. The book draws from the West’s almost forgotten contemplative tradition in its Platonic, Islamic, Christian, and Zoharic forms. It also explores ideas from modern philosophers Jan Zwicky, Gillian Rose, Dorothy Day, and Simone Weil, and from contemporary poets Don Domanski, Philip Kevin Paul, Anne Szumigalski, and Roberto Harrison. Lilburn suggests that listening, noticing, reading, and stretching our imaginations are all part of an interior stance that can assist with the difficult tasks of forming deep relationships with the land, with Indigenous peoples, and with pedagogy itself. Numinous Seditions is for scholars and readers interested in poetry, environmental philosophy, and in the possibility of a contemplative politics.