Concrete and Wild Carrot
Description
WINNER OF THE 2003 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE
In Margaret Avison's new poems, little pleasures are bound up with larger ones.
Her slightest subjects-beloved Toronto parks with their population of oaks, firs, squirrels, dogs, kids, even ants, and the minutest sighs of her contemporary urban soundscape-all have their being within an immense composition that calls and hauls us to a largeness, a category-breaking "always unthinkable" beyond."Words have their life too, won't/ compact into a theorem," Avison says, and this is certainly true of hers.
"To myself everywhere:
Cry out, "Break!" Break
all our securities, and break out!
Explore only the ranges
beyond our mastering. Take on
the inexorable demands made by
a norm of unpremeditated excellence!"
-from "Alternatives to Riots but all Citizens Must Play"
Concrete and Wild Carrot is Margaret Avison's sixth book of poems, her first with Brick Books-though we now distribute her Lancelot Press books. She is one of Canada's most respected writers, still at the top of her form in a career that stretches back to the 1940s, and during which she has gained three honorary degrees and two Governor General's Awards for Poetry (for Winter Sun and No Time).
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Margaret Avison was born in Ontario. She attended public school in Western Canada, high school and university in Toronto. She spent eight months in Chicago in 1956-57, on a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. She has worked in libraries, publishing houses, universities, archives, and missions, was writer-in- residence at the University of Western Ontario in 1973-74. In 1985 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. She lives in downtown Toronto.