One of Canada's greatest poets, Margaret Avison is a complex, introspective writer with roots in seventeenth-century metaphysical and meditational poetry. The first collection to span her entire career, Avison's Collected Poems stretches from her early work in the 1950s to the most recent poems, recording her conversion to Christianity.

Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

Avison, Margaret

Poetry

Oxford University Press

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.

Listening: The Last Poems of Margaret Avison

MCCLELLAND STEWART

`These are poems steeped in the Bible, but always imbued with genuine emotion and insight into contemporary life and without a tinge of self-righteousness.' (Bert Almon Canadian Book Review Annual)

Always Now (Always Now: Collected Poems)

Porcupine's Quill

Since childhood Margaret Avison has written poetry and published it. Always Now: The Collected Poems (three volumes), stretches from the 1930s to the twenty-first century, through Winter Sun in 1960 and Concrete and Wild Carrot in 2002 (winners, respectively, of the Governor-General's Award and the Griffin Prize for Poetry) to nineteen new poems selected for inclusion here.

Always Now: The Collected Poems, Vol. 3 (The Collected Poems of Margaret Avison)

Always Now, Collected Poems of Margaret Avison, encompasses in three volumes all of the published books, from Winter Sun (1960) to Concrete and Wild Carrot (2002), and is framed by a gathering of uncollected and new poems respectively. When complete, Always Now will present all of the poems, up to 2002, that Margaret Avison wishes to preserve. Volume One extends from the uncollected poems to Avison's translations of Hungarian poems, and includes Winter Sun and The Dumbfounding. Besides the uncollected surprises, two of them dating to high school days and first published in Hermes, Toronto's Humberside Collegiate literary magazine, there are the loved and familiar early poems, just as fresh now as they were then, from which certain wonderful lines still jump out: `Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes./ The optic heart must venture'; `In the mathematics of God/ there are percentages beyond one hundred.' Margaret Avison's poems have warmed the hearts and enlarged the thinking of two generations of Canadian readers.

`Margaret Avison was a highly regarded Canadian poet who saw poetry as her life's vocation but shied away from being publicly labelled a poet. She has been called reclusive, introspective; her poetry difficult and demanding. And yet, as shown by her enigmatically titled autobiography, I am Here and Not Not-There, she was also a woman with a lively curiosity and a real love for the world.' (Joanne Epp Globe &amp; Mail)

I Am Here and Not Not-There

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

In A Kind of Perseverance Margaret Avison shares with readers two lectures she gave at the University of Waterloo in 1993 -- `Misunderstanding is Damaging' and `Understanding is Costly'. Thoughtfully and with precision she tells of her journey, often unfocussed, that led finally to the Christian conversion that is central to an understanding of her poetry.

A Kind of Perseverance

Essays & Correspondence

The Essential Margaret Avison showcases the development of one of Canada's most brilliant and original poets, twice winner of the Governor-General's Award for Poetry. Margaret Avison's vibrant life work is distilled here into a selection that is illuminating, generous and richly varied.

The Essential Margaret Avison (Essential Poets)

A book of poems by the author of Winter Sun, The Dumbfounding and No Time.

Sunblue

Brick Books

"Avison's new volume is a lyrical tribute to a created order suffused with a holy energy--a vitality inaccessible to the statisticians, the engineers, the corporate mandarins. It is not, however, a whimsical, Pollyanish ecstacy that sustains her, but a gritty religious vision grounded in our desperate humanity, the 'roped-in, rotten, / welted and swollen, sick, / tempter-take-all/ maggot- ripe end of our fall' ('He himself suffered when he was tempted'), but redeemed, generously redeemed." (Michael Higgins)

No Time

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Avison, Margaret. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Avison, Margaret

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Avison, Margaret. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Selected Poems

Listening: The Last Poems of Margaret Avison

Always Now (Always Now: Collected Poems)

Always Now: The Collected Poems, Vol. 3 (The Collected Poems of Margaret Avison)

Always Now (Always Now: Collected Poems)

I Am Here and Not Not-There

A Kind of Perseverance

The Essential Margaret Avison (Essential Poets)

Sunblue

No Time