[.ca] Concrete and Wild Carrot (ISBN 1894078241)

Amazon.ca:
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