Listening

A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year


Margaret Avison was widely acknowledged as one of Canada’s foremost poets. Taut, sublime, subtle, and crystalline, the poems in her brilliant new collection, published posthumously, showcase Avison at her best, and constitute the final chapter in an extraordinary artistic legacy that spanned more than forty years."The radiant authority of Avison’s art, everywhere on display in this affective as well as effective volume, derives from a life spent observing, assimilating, listening and, most crucially, taking note of all that fills her senses. She opens her heart to the universe and, in so doing, finds fulfilment within its wondrous and often incomprehensibly wicked ways."
— Judith Fitzgerald, Globe and MailMargaret Avison’s work had, over the course of her four-decade-long career, won numerous awards, including two Governor General’s Awards and, for Concrete and Wild Carrot, the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her books of poetry include Always Now: The Collected Poems and, most recently, Momentary Dark. Margaret Avison died in July 2007, in Toronto.August. Reading

From lamplight on a glossy page
my eyes lift: now not
insects’ footprints along
gleamy paper, but a
wash of diluted, cold
green tea with
dust-bunny clouds afloat
southward, grape-tinted once but
fast fading. A
last lick of
ivory light tinctures
a tall, very far over,
wall.