The Larger Conversation

Reviews / Votes

"It takes a poet to see the extraordinary in the mundane.... This is reading for the joy of it." [Full review at https://www.blacklocks.ca/book-review-going-home] -- Holly Doan * Blacklock's Reporter * "In a series of essays, lectures, confessions, and interviews, all based on years of reading and research, Lilburn shares not new but old, reclaimed ways of thinking-long-ignored riches from the Christian, Judaic and Islamic contemplative wisdom traditions.... In order to undo the Western extractive, colonial approach to land-one that uses, warehouses, and dominates-we have to return to our former strengths, what Lilburn calls 'cognitive rebar.' What justice asks of us is that we do the work to prepare for conversation." [Full article at http://www.focusonvictoria.ca/novdec2017/the-larger-conversation-contemplation-and-place-r5/] -- Amy Reiswig * Focus Magazine * "This book is exactly what I think is required in the emerging scholarly and literary work on decolonization in Canada. This isn't a dry and heavy academic text marking up conceptual territory: territorializing knowledge with confusing title and jargon... This book is much more in the traditions of mystical contemplative philosophy." -- Cary Campbell * SubTerrain * "This collection of essays is the third in a series of books in which Lilburn reflects on his own sense of rootlessness, often as a cultural phenomenon. The current book's emphasis on the colonial condition is new...[The] construal at the heart of the book is individual and specific: North Americans of European descent suffer from a colonial malaise consisting significantly of a malformed relation to place." -- Carolyn Richardson * The Fiddlehead * "[Lilburn] feels that beneath 'the smoothness, the relative fine running of late capitalism,' there's a disturbing hunger... And why? Because, argues Lilburn, through chapters on philosophical inquiry, spiritual struggle, deep ecological concern, and unsparing self-confession, we have not truly learned how to live on this land so relatively new to us, a land acquired in many ways through violence and dishonesty... What Lilburn attempts in this larger conversation is to find a way back, through earnest inquiry with philosophers, mystics, poets, and saints stretching back thousands of years, to the 'essence of nature'..." [Full review at https://thestarphoenix.com/entertainment/books/book-reviews-lilburn-searches-for-meaning-peeteetuce-creates-scathing-depiction-of-phoniness] -- Bill Robertson * Saskatoon StarPhoenix * "In 1999, writer and poet Tim Lilburn published the non-fiction work Living in the World as if It Were Home, a meditation on humanity's relationship with the natural environment that has become a classic and was the first book in a loose trilogy examining the connections between politics, environmentalism, philosophy, and modernity. Eighteen years later, the final part of the trilogy, a volume of contemplative essays, is available from UAP." * Quill & Quire * "The Larger Conversation is a beautiful, patient, and persistent philosophical work.... Lilburn suggests that in entering a relationship with place, with any specific place that we care about, we can be seen by place and thus be given our identity-indeed our Being-through a kind of grace. I love this argument and line of thought for its beauty and practicality. It offers a true way to move forward from the colonial past by first making changes to how we perceive reality-a reality that we constantly misunderstand-about how and why and who we are in place." [Full review at http://canlit.ca/article/being-seen-by-place/] -- Susie DeCoste * Canadian Literature 236 * "One of Lilburn's primary interests has always been the relationship - the dialogue - between poetry and philosophy, including their common roots and common objectives.... At the same time, some of this writing is deeply personal, even confessional; here, the writer is more candid than usual about his own life, including childhood memories, illness and aging, faith and doubt." Kelly Shepherd, UTP Quarterly 2017 [Full review at DOI 10.3138/utq.88.3.hr79]