Tim Lilburn - Böcker

Tim Lilburn has long been recognized for his ability to explore issues of ecology from a variety of viewpoints — philosophical, moral, ethical, even poetic. This new collection expands on his thoughts in surprising and enlightening ways, concentrating on how we relate (often uneasily) to our physical landscape in Canada and the United States. Going Home is especially timely in a world where the whole of North America is waking up to the fact that our “home” is endangered because of how we live in it.

The selected poems in Desire Never Leaves span Tim Lilburn's career, demonstrating the evolution of a unique and careful thinker as he takes his place among the nation's premier writers. This edition of his poetry untangles many of the strands running through his works, providing insight into a poetic world that is both spectacular and humbling. The introduction by Alison Calder situates Lilburn's writing in an alternate tradition of prairie poetry that relies less on the vernacular and more on philosophy and meditation. Examining Lilburn's antecedents in Christian mysticism and the ascetic tradition, Calder stresses the paradoxical nature of Lilburn's writing - the expression of loss through plenitude. The divine in the natural world is glimpsed in brief flashes; nevertheless, the poet, driven by love, continues his quest for what glitters in things. Tim Lilburn's afterword is an evocative meditation grounded in personal history. He speaks of how poetry, a craning quiet, allows one to hear what is alive in the world. He also describes how poetry is resolutely attached to both a historical moment and an individual subjectivity that is inevitably anchored in time. Lilburn's poetry is both a religious undertaking and a political gesture that speaks to the urgency of situating ourselves where we live.

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."

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.