Most Popular Books by Tim Lilburn

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.

From Governor General''s Award-winning poet Tim Lilburn comes a new collection of poetry of great scope and ambition. The Names is personal and familial archaeology, an extemporal dig giving spectres back to their bodies. With its lines sped up and dazzlingly associative, Tim Lilburn’s cocktail of obsessions – confession, ontology, mystical theology, humour and extreme, fleet, apt weirdness – marches through on full display. He pulls in an even broader cast of characters than his previous collections managed: John Ruusbroec and Marguerite Porete brush past aunts, uncles, and unusual creatures steering the boats of language past fog-draped trees. In Lilburn’s latest collection, we are immersed in a realism of remarkable proportions, as though incandescent memory comprised both texture and text, and combined formed the elemental fibres of a perilous present.

By the winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Best Book of the Year To his virtuoso collection of new poems, Tim Lilburn brings a philosopher’s mind and the eyes and ears of a marsh hawk. This series of earthy meditations makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Lilburn’s close study of goldenrod, an ice sheet, or night opens into surprising interior and subterranean worlds. Pythagoras lurks within the poplars, Socrates in stones, people fly below the ground. Elsewhere, the human presence of motels and beer parlours is ominous. Kill-site is an exploration of a human’s animal nature. Lilburn invites the reader to: “Go below the small things… then / walk inside them and you have their kindness.” Though a natural progression from Lilburn’s last book, To the River, in Kill-site, the poet moves toward a greater understanding of the human, of sacrifice.

Like his contemporaries Robert Bringhurst, Ronald Wright, Dennis Lee, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky, Tim Lilburn has long been a deep thinker on issues of ecology and writing, and on how the two fit together philosophically, morally, and ethically. In Going Home, Lilburn addresses how we relate (often uneasily) to our physical landscape in Canada and the United States.Retrieving an almost lost strand in the Western intellectual tradition -- the erotic, contemplative strand, from Plato to John Cassian to the Areopagite -- Lilburn traces a history of eros and desire in the hope that this exercise and its awakening can lead us home to a full residence in North America. Surprising and enlightening, the collection finishes with two unforgettable personal essays, where Lilburn writes about his effort to enact desire in the place where his ancestors are buried, the flatlands and coulees of southern Saskatchewan.

To the River is a beautifully crafted gathering of poems. Turning and returning to the banks of the South Saskatchewan River, it is a compelling meditation conducted in the presence of a particular landscape. With great metaphorical muscle, the poems move towards the inhabitants of that riverscape, which remains rich with a sense of the strangeness inside the familiarity of willow, geese, river ice, coyote, snowberry. It is not just the satisfaction of aesthetic accomplishment which gives the book its compulsive energy, but the persistence of the seeker’s desire for what eludes even our strongest acts of language. Contemplative and spare, spiritual and sensual, To the River is a poetry of praise, a love poem to the earth, a prayer, and a journal of interior practice. It is a collection written by a poet moving into the full stretch of his power.

With Numinous Seditions, celebrated poet and essayist Tim Lilburn investigates inner dispositions that might help us bear the new sorrows of the climate crisis. The book draws from the West’s almost forgotten contemplative tradition in its Platonic, Islamic, Christian, and Zoharic forms. It also explores ideas from modern philosophers Jan Zwicky, Gillian Rose, Dorothy Day, and Simone Weil, and from contemporary poets Don Domanski, Philip Kevin Paul, Anne Szumigalski, and Roberto Harrison. Lilburn suggests that listening, noticing, reading, and stretching our imaginations are all part of an interior stance that can assist with the difficult tasks of forming deep relationships with the land, with Indigenous peoples, and with pedagogy itself. Numinous Seditions is for scholars and readers interested in poetry, environmental philosophy, and in the possibility of a contemplative politics.

This volume, the final in Tim Lilburn’s decades-long meditation on philosophy and environmental consequences, traces a relationship between mystic traditions and the political world. Struck by the realization that he did not know how to be where he found himself, Lilburn embarked on a personal attempt at decolonization, seeking to uncover what is wrong within Canadian culture and to locate a possible path to recovery. He proposes a new epistemology leading to an ecologically responsible and spiritually acute relationship between settler Canadians, Indigenous peoples, and the land we inhabit. The Larger Conversation is a bold statement: a vital text for readers of environmental philosophy and for anyone interested in building toward conversation between Indigenous peoples and settlers.

A new collection by the winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Tim Lilburn’s award-winning work has observed the natural world with an intensity of seeing and a reverence that shifts the way we understand our lives. Now, in his brilliant new collection of poems, Lilburn has turned his meticulous, unerring eye to an intimate, utterly compelling exploration of the body’s fall into illness. These haunting poems take the reader below the surface of things into a peculiar world of personal and social alteration. Its incantatory insistence and its shocking imagistic leaps make the poetry a sustained act of therapy, a ritual instrument for change.

From Governor General''s Award-winning poet Tim Lilburn comes a new collection of poetry of great scope and ambition. Assiniboia is a richly textured imagining of a Western Canada that could have been. Theatrical, operatic -- a masque and a pair of choral performances -- the book breaks new formal ground in Canadian poetry. The huge spectacle of Tim Lilburn''s eighth collection gives us a new land peopled by figures from the visionary governments of Louis Riel and from the western mysticism, as well as land forms with the power of speech, all acting together as a kind of ghostly army bent on overturning more than a century of colonial practice.

The best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured annually with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s richest and most prestigious literary awards. This edition of the anthology includes poems from each of the books shortlisted in both the Canadian and international categories for 2011, and are selected and introduced by judges Tim Lilburn, Colm Toibin, and Chase Twichell. Royalties from the sales of the anthologies are donated to UNESCO’s World Poetry Day, created to support linguistic diversity through poetic expression and to offer endangered languages the opportunity to be heard in their communities.

"With Tourist To Ecstasy, we have the further emergence of a new and important poet, a visionary not in any reckless sense, but as a mature, meditative and religious presence. With his own distinctive tone and line, Lilburn seeks communion with the dead, with animals, with the spirits that animate fields, trees, nervous collapse and the glittering mall. This is reverential singing in the darkness" --

In this remarkable collection of meditations, Lilburn describes a state of being that he calls the ''chthonic self'' - a condition that moves towards resolving our separation from the natural world and its innately mysterious inhabitants. ''Living In The World As If It Were Home'' is a truly essential book from one of Canada''s finest poets.

''Moosewood Sandhills'' is akin to a lost sacred text of the desert fathers. It documents a poet''s return to the parched Saskatchewan scrubland where ''the dead are believed to meander''. Here Lilburn slept under summer stars and resolved to focus on simple acts of attention. The century was closing. The result was revelation.

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.

Harmonia Mundi borrows its title from Johannes Kepler''s melodious theory of the heavens, but the ''alarming geometry'' that Tim Lilburn presents in these forty-one poems is far from harmonious. Part One, ''The Philosophical History'', focuses on the suppression of Plato''s Academy in the early 6th century, followed by its disastrous relocation to the court of Khusrau in Persia. Part Two, ''Actants, Conatus'', is rooted in contemporary Canada, albeit with a cast of characters that include Augustine, Christ, Duns Scotus, Aelred of Rievaulx and even Kepler himself. These two apparently disparate sections are connected by their preoccupation with loss - with ''beauty infiltrated everywhere'' - and by a feeling of political disaffection at the demise of certain sustaining paradigms. Harmonia Mundi is a timely and darkly visionary text, which, amid the spreading collapse of world around us, clings to a single, urgent truth: ''You must hate / nothing''.

In this collaboration, which can be viewed as two visions in dialogue, Shantz and Lilburn each focus on the story of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who descends from her throne in heaven to the underworld. After being killed there by her sister, Inanna is reborn to return transformed, with her adornments no longer external but "formed by the scars of her healed wounds" (Shantz), a new Inanna who is also "a new physics" (Lilburn). By dramatizing the myth of the female dying-and- rising divinity in Lilburn''s poetic sequence and a series of colour photographs of Shantz''s room-sized constructions, the book offers us all access to the roots of feminine power in our lives.

A comparable training of desire appears in the ascetical theology of such Christian writers as John Cassian, pseudo-Dionysius and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. As with Plato''s dialogues, the works of these thinkers are accounts of "turning the soul around" (Republic 518d, 521c), and are themselves training documents for those who subsequently read them. They are less concerned with the assertion of dogma than with the drawing of such readers into the practice of the higher forms of contemplative prayer. This dissertation sees a continuous tradition of erotics and soul craft extending from Plato to Christian writers in spirituality in late antiquity and beyond.