Concrete and Wild Carrot
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Margaret Avison |
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| Publisher | Brick Books |
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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: | |
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. 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).
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Followers of Margaret Avison’s work won’t find many surprises in her Griffin Prize-nominated collection, Concrete and Wild Carrot. The elegies for departed friends, sincere and unsentimental Christian lyrics, and keen-eyed urban reflections of earlier works like No Time are all here. Most of these poems are brief free verse lyrics, written in seemingly plain language that is always aware of its history—Avison is a poet best read with the O.E.D. within easy reach. Readers unfamiliar with her verse should attempt to imagine a poetry that incorporates Geoffrey Hill’s mind for Christian abstraction and dramatization, P.K. Page’s sense of prosody, and something of George Bowering’s line (Bowering considers Avison to be among Canada’s finest poets).
An absolute faith in Christianity is fundamental to Concrete and Wild Carrot, and readers who are resistant to sincere religion in contemporary writing may find themselves resisting Avison’s poems. She frequently portrays God as the author or artist of the universe, with temporal art occupying a vital but subordinate position. Languages, however, are gifts from God that shape their writers and speakers:
Hebrew’s ornate iron, its quirks around the line
(vocal or consonant) in you have wrought
the odd intransigent openness—and untaught
much we grew up to mimic—or disdain.
Concrete and Wild Carrot threatens to be just a nice little collection, but Avison is far too intelligent and aware of the world’s woes to allow that to happen. The final poem in the book, “Alternative to Riots / but All Citizens Must Play” is an overt call for peaceful anarchism, for the destruction of all social fictions to the greater glory of God and humanity. It’s stirring stuff, and will make anyone look over Avison’s poems with a keener, more revolutionary eye. —Jack Illingworth
