Desire Never Leaves

Tim Lilburn

Description

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.

Sujets

• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 03 août 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9780889205406
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Desire Never Leaves
The Poetry of Tim Lilburn
Selected with an introduction by
Alison Calder and an afterword by Tim Lilburn
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lilburn, Tim, 1950- Desire never leaves : the poetry of Tim Lilburn / selected, with an introduction, by Alison Calder ; and an afterword by Tim Lilburn.
(Laurier poetry series) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN -13: 978-0-88920-514-7 ISBN -10: 0-88920-514-0
I . Calder, Alison C. (Alison Claire), 1969- II . Title. III . Series.
PS 8573. I 427 A 6 2007 C 811 .54 C 2006-906448-2
2007 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N 2 L 3 C 5 www.wlupress.wlu.ca
Cover image: Pamela Woodland, Untitled , 2004. Colour photograph.
Cover and text design by P.J. Woodland.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.

This book is printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper.
Printed in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Table of Contents
Foreword, Neil Besner
Biographical Note
Introduction, Alison Calder
Names Of God
1 Love At The Center Of Objects
2 Allah Of The Green Circuitry
3 Light s Gobbling Eye
Theophany And Argument
Pumpkins
Fervourino To A Barn Of Milking Doe Goats Early Easter Morning
Call To Worship In A Mass For The Life Of The World
Elohim Mocks His Images For The Life Of The World
I Bow To It
Spirit Of Agriculture, 1986
In The Hills, Watching
Contemplation Is Mourning
How To Be Here?
Restoration
Pitch
There Is No Presence
A Book Of Exhaustion
Kill-Site
There
Afterword: Walking Out of Silence, Tim Lilburn
Acknowledgements
Foreword
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, poetry in Canada-writing and publishing it, reading and thinking about it-finds itself in a strangely conflicted place. We have many strong poets continuing to produce exciting new work, and there is still a small audience for poetry; but increasingly, poetry is becoming a vulnerable art, for reasons that don t need to be rehearsed.
But there are things to be done: we need more real engagement with our poets. There needs to be more access to their work in more venues-in classrooms, in the public arena, in the media-and there needs to be more, and more different kinds of publications, that make the wide range of our contemporary poetry more widely available.
The hope that animates this new series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press is that these volumes will help to create and sustain the larger reader-ship that contemporary Canadian poetry so richly deserves. Like our fiction writers, our poets are much celebrated abroad; they should just as properly be better known at home.
Our idea has been to ask a critic (sometimes herself a poet) to select thirty-five pages of poetry from across a poet s career; write an engaging, accessible introduction; and have the poet write an afterword. In this way, we think that the usual practice of teaching a poet through eight or twelve poems from an anthology will be much improved upon; and readers in and out of classrooms will have more useful, engaging, and comprehensive introductions to a poet s work. Readers might also come to see more readily, we hope, the connections among, as well as the distances between, the life and the work.
It was the ending of an Al Purdy poem that gave Margaret Laurence the epigraph for The Diviners : but they had their being once /and left a place to stand on. Our poets still do, and they are leaving many places to stand on. We hope that this series will help, variously, to show how and why this is so.
- Neil Besner
General Editor
Biographical Note
Tim Lilburn was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, on June 27, 1950. He was trained as a Jesuit and spent many years teaching philosophy and creative writing at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon and St. Peter s College in Muenster, Saskatchewan. He has taught in West Africa and herded goats in Ontario. He currently lives in Victoria, BC, where he teaches Creative Writing at the University of Victoria.
Lilburn has written six poetry collections, among them Tourist to Ecstasy (1989), which was shortlisted for the Governor General s Award for poetry, and Moosewood Sandhills (1994), which won the Canadian Authors Association Award. From the Great Above She Opened Her Ear to the Great Below (1988) is a collaboration with visual artist Susan Shantz. In 1999, he won two Saskatchewan Book Awards: the Nonfiction Award for his collection of essays, Living in the World As If It Were Home, and the Book of the Year Award for the poetry book To the River. He has also edited, and contributed to, two anthologies of essays about poetry and philosophy: Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy and Poetry and Knowing. His latest poetry collection, Kill-Site, won the Governor General s Award in 2003. His work is widely anthologized.
Introduction
Tim Lilburn s poetry should come with two instructions to the reader: have courage, and relax. Have courage because the poetry, on first glance, can appear daunting; relax because, well, it s beautiful words on a page. So you don t know all about these characters Nicholas of Cusa or Paul Celan ? Relax and listen to the music. An expert on classical music will have a different experience of a Beethoven symphony than a non-expert will, but they ll both enjoy the concert. Lilburn s poetry is no different. His well-crafted lyrics, both thoughtful and artful, treat the basic objects of the world around us at the same time as they gesture towards something that words themselves cannot express. The resulting verse mixes the profane and the sacred, ultimately insisting on the necessary coexistence of both.
Lilburn writes about place very intensively, but his poetry may not provide what readers of prairie poetry expect. One strand of prairie poetry, heavily influenced by the writings of Robert Kroetsch, Dennis Cooley, and Andy Suknaski, uses vernacular speech to provide a record of prairie experience. This kind of poetry is narrative, conversational, and often, though not always, accessible. It may also rely on the convention of the lyric narrator, a voice confessing its thoughts. Another strand of prairie poetry, to which I think Lilburn is much more closely aligned, comes down through writers like Anne Szumigalski and shows up in poetry like that of Jan Zwicky, whose lyrics draw on a wide range of subject matter and philosophical and literary influences to produce an eclectic mix of voices. The distinction between these two strands-John Deere vs. John Donne, let us say-is in some ways artificial, as vernacular poetry also draws on a wide range of influences, and more formal poetry often speaks directly to immediate prairie experience. Nonetheless, Lilburn s poetry uses different conventions than those usually called prairie, and thus requires a different kind of readerly approach. He doesn t give us a solid narrator for us to ground our readings in. He mixes the wordplay of Gerard Manley Hopkins with the whimsy of Dylan Thomas, pinning it all to philosophical questions raised by early Christian mystics and Classical Greek thinkers. His work starts with the prairie, but it does not end there; the place with which he is concerned is the larger world viewed through close attention to environmental detail. Lilburn is a thinking poet; he s working through various tough questions about the relation of the human to the environment and the artist to the Divine, and none of these elements can be separated from the others. He s working hard, and it behooves readers to put a little effort into their readings too. He s not running counter to prairie writing ; he s expanding the category.
Though Lilburn s poetry draws on religious and philosophical languages born far from the prairie, his poems continually insist on their here -ness. They are about somewhere in particular, and where they are located needs to be looked at carefully. Living in the World As If It Were Home , the title of his essay collection, points to this connection with the immediate environment. But what does it really mean to live in the world? And what is lying in wait in that tricky phrase as if, waiting to trip us up?
Central to Lilburn s poetics are the concepts of eros and sorrow. Eros, or erotic love, is the desire that one has for the beloved. For Lilburn it is also the desire that one has to connect with the divine presence immanent in the natural world, the desire to get at the essence of the world, its soul. Sorrow results from the recognition that this connection is impossible-how can we possibly know the essential natures of other things? What makes the deer a deer will always surpass our understanding. This desire to express the inexpressible is part of a long poetic tradition; in fact, one might argue that it is from this desire that poetry sprang in the first place. Think of met