Always Now: The Collected Poems. Volume One

Avison, Margaret

ISBN 10: 0889842620 / ISBN 13: 9780889842625

Published by Erin, Ontario, Canada: Porcupines Quill, Erin, ON, Canada, 2003

About this Item

Original printed wraps. 256 pp. Octavo. `The poetic genius of cold weather is Toronto poet Margaret Avison, whose work hooked me in my thirties and has never let go. Poems like Snow, New Year's Poem, Thaw, Banff and Death, which first appeared in Winter Sun (University of Toronto Press, 1960), have now happily reappeared in Always Now, the first volume of her collected poems (Porcupine's Quill, 2003). `Avison gives us the full array of physical and spiritual possibilities from lock-up to thaw. The feast and famine that ruled John Hornby's life has echoes in her poetry, where tiny physical phenomena are seen with the "hallucinatory intensity" of a last meal. On a window ledge lies a lost pearl in "the suety, snow-luminous plainness / of morning." At the end of the day, under a snow-laden sky, "Madame night" appears in "prune and mottled plumes." `George Whalley wrote about the unknowable in human and natural form, Margaret Avison writes about the unknowable in all its forms. In her poetry, weather is a portent, a visible sign of the invisible, evidence of God made flesh. Our lives, she suggests, are held by the weather, penetrated by "precious terrible coldness" and enlarged by looking upward. When "the soul's gates" unseal, snow turns into "asters of tumbled quietness." ' -- Elizabeth Hay, the Globe and Mail. Printed offset by Tim Inkster on the Heidelberg KORD at the printing office of the Porcupine's Quill in the Village of Erin, Wellington County, Ontario, Canada. Smyth sewn into 16-page signatures with hand-tipped endleaves front and back.

Seller Inventory # 0889842620

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Always Now: The Collected Poems. Volume One
• Publisher: Erin, Ontario, Canada: Porcupines Quill, Erin, ON, Canada
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0889842620
• ISBN 13: 9780889842625
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Canadian Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

One of Canada's most respected poets, Margaret Avison was born in Galt, Ontario, lived in Western Canada in her childhood, and then in Toronto. In a productive career that stretched back to the 1940s, she produced seven books of poems, including her first collection, Winter Sun (1960), which she assembled in Chicago while she was there on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and which won the Governor General's Award. No Time (Lancelot Press), a work that focussed on her interest in spirit