Always Now: The Collected Poems, Vol. 2

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

This second volume of Margaret Avison’s collected poetry is
self-recommending. Tim Inkster is publishing Avison’s work in elegant
editions. This book brings together the first two works—sunblue and No
Time—written after her powerful religious experience. These are poems
steeped in the Bible, but always imbued with genuine emotion and insight
into contemporary life and without a tinge of self-righteousness.
Typical of the fastidiousness of this octogenarian writer—perhaps, as
George Bowering has said, Canada’s finest poet—is the publication
history of “The Jo Poems,” her elegies for an old friend, Josephine
Grimshaw. The friend died in 1967 but the poems were published only in
1989 because the author thought they might be merely confessional. In
2005, the Porcupine’s Quill will publish a third volume, containing
the two most recently published books and a selection of new work:
another self-recommending book.