From Governor General's Award-winning poet Tim Lilburn comes a new collection of poetry of great scope and ambition. The Names is personal and familial archaeology, an extemporal dig giving spectres back to their bodies. With its lines sped up and dazzlingly associative, Tim Lilburn’s cocktail of obsessions – confession, ontology, mystical theology, humour and extreme, fleet, apt weirdness – marches through on full display. He pulls in an even broader cast of characters than his previous collections managed: John Ruusbroec and Marguerite Porete brush past aunts, uncles, and unusual creatures steering the boats of language past fog-draped trees. In Lilburn’s latest collection, we are immersed in a realism of remarkable proportions, as though incandescent memory comprised both texture and text, and combined formed the elemental fibres of a perilous present.

The Names: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Lilburn, TIm

Genre Fiction

MCCLELLAND STEWART

From Governor General's Award-winning poet Tim Lilburn comes a new collection of poetry of great scope and ambition.  Assiniboia is a richly textured imagining of a Western Canada that could have been. Theatrical, operatic -- a masque and a pair of choral performances -- the book breaks new formal ground in Canadian poetry. The huge spectacle of Tim Lilburn's eighth collection gives us a new land peopled by figures from the visionary governments of Louis Riel and from the western mysticism, as well as land forms with the power of speech, all acting together as a kind of ghostly army bent on overturning more than a century of colonial practice.

Assiniboia

By the winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Best Book of the Year To his virtuoso collection of new poems, Tim Lilburn brings a philosopher’s mind and the eyes and ears of a marsh hawk. This series of earthy meditations makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Lilburn’s close study of goldenrod, an ice sheet, or night opens into surprising interior and subterranean worlds. Pythagoras lurks within the poplars, Socrates in stones, people fly below the ground. Elsewhere, the human presence of motels and beer parlours is ominous. Kill-site is an exploration of a human’s animal nature. Lilburn invites the reader to: “Go below the small things… then / walk inside them and you have their kindness.” Though a natural progression from Lilburn’s last book, To the River, in Kill-site, the poet moves toward a greater understanding of the human, of sacrifice.

Kill-site

Poetry

To the River is a beautifully crafted gathering of poems. Turning and returning to the banks of the South Saskatchewan River, it is a compelling meditation conducted in the presence of a particular landscape. With great metaphorical muscle, the poems move towards the inhabitants of that riverscape, which remains rich with a sense of the strangeness inside the familiarity of willow, geese, river ice, coyote, snowberry. It is not just the satisfaction of aesthetic accomplishment which gives the book its compulsive energy, but the persistence of the seeker’s desire for what eludes even our strongest acts of language. Contemplative and spare, spiritual and sensual, To the River is a poetry of praise, a love poem to the earth, a prayer, and a journal of interior practice. It is a collection written by a poet moving into the full stretch of his power.

To the River

Tim Lilburn has long been recognized for his ability to explore issues of ecology from a variety of viewpoints philosophical, moral, ethical, even poetic. This new collection expands on his thoughts in surprising and enlightening ways, concentrating on how we relate (often uneasily) to our physical landscape in Canada and the United States. Going Home is especially timely in a world where the whole of North America is waking up to the fact that our home” is endangered because of how we live in it.

Going Home: Essays

Science & Math

Biological Sciences

House of Anansi Press

The selected poems in Desire Never Leaves span Tim Lilburn’s career, demonstrating the evolution of a unique and careful thinker as he takes his place among the nation’s premier writers. This edition of his poetry untangles many of the strands running through his works, providing insight into a poetic world that is both spectacular and humbling.   The introduction by Alison Calder situates Lilburn’s writing in an alternate tradition of prairie poetry that relies less on the vernacular and more on philosophy and meditation. Examining Lilburn’s antecedents in Christian mysticism and the ascetic tradition, Calder stresses the paradoxical nature of Lilburn’s writing―the expression of loss through plenitude. The divine in the natural world is glimpsed in brief flashes; nevertheless, the poet, driven by love, continues his quest for what glitters in things.   Tim Lilburn’s afterword is an evocative meditation grounded in personal history. He speaks of how poetry, a craning quiet, allows one to hear what is alive in the world. He also describes how poetry is resolutely attached to both a historical moment and an individual subjectivity that is inevitably anchored in time. Lilburn’s poetry is both a religious undertaking and a political gesture that speaks to the urgency of situating ourselves where we live.

Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn (Laurier Poetry)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

This volume, the third in Tim Lilburn's decades-long meditation on philosophy and environmental consequences, traces a relationship between mystic traditions and the political world. Struck by the realization that he did not know how to be where he found himself, Lilburn embarked on a personal attempt at decolonization, seeking to uncover what is wrong within Canadian culture and to locate a possible path to recovery. He proposes a new epistemology: an ecologically responsible and spiritually acute relationship between settler Canadians, Indigenous peoples, and the land we inhabit. The Larger Conversation is a bold statement: a vital text for readers of environmental philosophy and for anyone interested in opening up the conversation between Indigenous peoples and settlers.

The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

University of Alberta Press

Harmonia Mundi borrows its title from Johannes Kepler's melodious theory of the heavens, but the 'alarming geometry' that Tim Lilburn presents in these forty-one poems is far from harmonious. Part One, 'The Philosophical History', focuses on the suppression of Plato's Academy in the early 6th century, followed by its disastrous relocation to the court of Khusrau in Persia. Part Two, 'Actants, Conatus', is rooted in contemporary Canada, albeit with a cast of characters that include Augustine, Christ, Duns Scotus, Aelred of Rievaulx and even Kepler himself. These two apparently disparate sections are connected by their preoccupation with loss - with 'beauty infiltrated everywhere' - and by a feeling of political disaffection at the demise of certain sustaining paradigms. Harmonia Mundi is a timely and darkly visionary text, which, amid the spreading collapse of the world around us, clings to a single, urgent truth: 'You must hate / nothing'.

Harmonia Mundi

Xylem Books

'Living In The World As If It Were Home' is a remarkable collection of meditations from one of Canada's finest poets - a truly essential text for students of esoteric thought, natural history and ecological poetry. In these essays Lilburn shares his belief that desire for the world in which we live can lead us to a state of being that he calls the 'chthonic self' - a condition that moves towards resolving our separation from the natural world and its innately mysterious inhabitants. First published in 1999, this prescient text makes a vital philosophical contribution to the contemporary debate about 'rewilding'.'Consciousness walks across the land bridge of the deer's stare into the world of things. This is knowing. It tastes of sorrow and towering appetite. Their look seems a bestowal; I feel more substantial, less apologetic as a physical thing from having been seen. The traded look goes on in the building dark. There is no intention here, nothing of fairy tale or hagiography, animals lying down with the solitary, animals bearing messages, scrolls caught in the clefts of their hooves. There is only wild seeing, the feel of it unimaginable: I am seen straight through (of that, no doubt) but cannot say how I am seen. Travelling back through the conductor of this gaze, something of me, a slant I'd never guess, enters them. Their look has a particularity, an inexpressibility, so high-pitched it attracts myths. No wonder some say the darkness of the forest is a god.'Lilburn, who spent several years as a Jesuit, explores a rare path of early Christian mysticism known as apophatic theology - the 'negative way'; sharing his belief that a route used to reach the divine can also be used to forge a genuine relationship with nature, which is no less divine than anything alluded to in theological texts. He is concerned with cultivating 'eros' and surrendering to an unceasing longing; it is this longing that may remove our anthropocentric beliefs and bring us closer to a world from which we have become estranged.A quiet path, a path of etiquette, a path of 'seeing'; the landscape of the South Saskatchewan River becomes tinglingly alive, its various histories become presences, its inhabitants - deer, coyote, poplar, river - are mysterious; distant yet offering glimpses through their singular perfections towards a route home; towards our own lost placement in the cosmos.Surrendering to this new way, becoming a disciple of deer, soil, lichen, eventually alters our perceptions, reinvigorating them, stripping away the extraneous so what we are left with is the poverty of a truthful 'seeing', a never-ending longing, and a ceaseless desire that may restore us to a genuine relationship with the world surrounding us, the world which we long to return to as home.

Living In The World As If It Were Home

'Moosewood Sandhills' can be thought of as a poetic counterpart to Lilburn's seminal collection of essays, 'Living In The World As If It Were Home'. It documents his retreat to the parched scrublands of Saskatchewan, Canada; a place where 'the dead are believed to meander'. Here he 'planted thin gardens, dug a root cellar, slept in the fields under summer stars - and looked'. The poems, by turns revelatory and ecstatic, revolve around simple acts of attention; of exchanging glances with animals; of seeing their traces in the bare hills. 'Moosewood Sandhills' is akin to a lost sacred text of the desert fathers; a remarkable collection of meditations from one of Canada's finest poets.

Moosewood Sandhills

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