The Volcano's High Held Snow Note: Poems

From Governor General's Award-winning poet Tim Lilburn comes a stunning new collection of poetry about the natural world and our place in it.

The Volcano’s High Held Snow Note is a collection preoccupied with a small mountain called SṈAḴE (Snow Mountain) in the language of the W̱SÁNEĆ people on the Saanich Peninsula and the Gulf Islands. The time is the days of early Covid and the multiplying signs of violent climate alteration in burning northern forests. Elsewhere, an uncanny holy child wishes to swim through matter and find healing substances deep under the earth, Marguerite Porete has some ideas for how to deal with Master Reason in a crisis, and hummingbirds take in half-frozen sugar slush as anagogic liquid.

TIM LILBURN lives in the Bowker Creek watershed in W̱SÁNEĆ territory on Vancouver Island. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Harmonia Mundi, The House of Charlemagne, The Names, Assiniboia, Orphic Politics, Kill-site, Moosewood Sandhills, and To the River. His poetry has received the Governor General’s Award, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the European Medal of Poetry and Art (the Homer Medal), and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, among other prizes. His poetry has been translated widely. Lilburn is also the author of three earlier essay collections, Living In The World As If It Were Home, Going Home, and The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place, and editor of two other influential books on poetics. A new essay collection, Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change, appeared from the University of Alberta Press in 2023. He has taught at the University of Victoria, the University of Saskatchewan, and Middlebury College, and worked with the dance company New Dance Horizons as a writer and performer, collaborating with directors Edward Poitras and Robin Poitras. He has been the poetry editor for Grain and was one of the founders of Jackpine Press.