Concrete and Wild Carrot

By Margaret Avison

Winner of the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize and of the 2003 CAA Jack Chalmers Poetry Award and Globe 100 book for 2003

In Margaret Avison's new poems, little pleasures are bound up with larger ones. Her slightest subjects -- beloved Toronto parks with their population of oaks, firs, squirrels, dogs, kids, even ants, and the minutest sighs of her contemporary urban soundscape -- all have their being within an immense composition that calls and hauls us to a largeness, a category-breaking "always unthinkable" beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 2002
• ISBN: 9781771312851

Margaret Avison

Margaret Avison was born in Ontario. She attended public school in Western Canada, high school and university in Toronto. She spent eight months in Chicago in 1956-57, on a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. She has worked in libraries, publishing houses, universities, archives, and missions, was writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario in 1972-73. In 1985 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. She was awarded three honorary degrees and two Governor General’s Awards for Poetry (for Winter Sun and No Time). In 2003 she was the winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the CAA Jack Chalmers Poetry Award and received a Globe 100 citation for her book Concrete and Wild Carrot.

Book preview

CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT

MARGARET AVISON

Other Works by Margaret Avison

Winter Sun, 1960

The Dumbfounding, 1966

sunblue, 1978

Winter Sun/The Dumbfounding, 1982

No Time, 1989

Selected Poems, 1991

Not Yet But Still, 1997

A Kind of Perseverance, 1993 (Pascal Lectures at the

            University of Waterloo)

Collaborations:

The Plough and the Pen, 1963

Acta Sanctorum, 1966

CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT

MARGARET AVISON

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Avison, Margaret, 1918-

              Concrete and wild carrot / Margaret Avison

Poems.

ISBN 1-894078-24-1

              I. Title

PS8501.V5C65 2002      C811’.54      C2002-902871-X

PR9199.3.A92C65 2002

Copyright©Margaret Avison 2002.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for

the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book

Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP),

and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our

publishing program.

The cover photograph was taken by Paul Best.

The photograph of the author was taken by Joan Eichner.

Brick Books

Box 20081

431 Boler Road

London, Ontario

N6K 4G6

Canada

www.brickbooks.ca

Contents

Pacing the Turn of the Year

Present from Ted

Towards the Next Change

Prairie Poem: for George Grant

Dividing Goods

Ramsden

Balancing Out

The Crux

Ambivalence

Relating

Responses

Audrey: a Posthumous Portrait

Reversing a Crater

Third Hand, First Hand

Notes from Dr. Carson’s Exposition of I John 5

He Was There / He Was Here

Remembering Gordon G. Nanos

Other Oceans

The Whole Story

Cycle of Community

Seriously?

Dead Ends

Prospecting

Lament for Byways

Rising Dust

Two

Leading Questions

Uncircular

The Endangerer

To Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Four Words

On a Maundy Thursday Walk

In our little nests

Contextualizing, or Neither Here nor There

Alternative to Riots but All Citizens Must Play

Notes

Acknowledgements

Biography

Pacing the Turn of the Year

A sudden season

has changed our world.

Everybody is out

to see, or bask, or

with their kind to exuberate.

Everything is new.

Trees that were only sticks

into the overcast

yesterday, are

soft and full of catkins

like newly shampooed children being

readied for the party.

Slender young saplings

shine, all the tender leaves

distinct, notes of music

atremble for a chance musician

strolling by to hear and

play — for