Always Now: The Collected Poems, Vol. 3

Description

220 pages
Contains Index
$19.95
ISBN 0-88984-261-2
DDC C811'.54

Year

2005

Contributor

Reviewed by Allison Sivak

Allison Sivak is a librarian in the Science and Technology Library at
the University of Alberta.

Review

Margaret Avison has been a pervasive influence on many Canadian writers
for almost five generations. Always Now, released in three volumes,
compiles her collected works, encompassing almost every poem she has
written, and containing everything she “wishes to preserve,” as
noted in the foreword. This third volume includes the books Not Yet But
Still (1997) and Concrete and Wild Carrot (2002), as well as a number of
new poems. Avison writes a searching religious poetry in precise and
concrete language, firmly anchored in the physical as she contemplates
the spiritual. She can also be quietly but commandingly political, as in
“Alternative to Riots But All Citizens Must Play,” a poem about both
the anti-globalization movement and the danger of clinging to earthly
things: “Money is no longer / visible. Now / it vaporizes and
disperses somehow / and settles over all of us. / We turn into a
monstrous / sameness, a jumble / within one skin, / a skin pulled taut /
until it hurts.”

While Avison works with grand ideas, hers is a poetry of sound and a
muted wordplay, encouraging the reader to speak her poems out loud. In
“Cycle of Community”: “[…] to give our city / a voice, dampered
by distance; / serves, through outer / windless openness of skywash, to
/ open a bud of tremulous hearing.” Her work reveals a freshness out
of her own vivid exploration of ideology and image. Her idiosyncratic
voice is steady, exacting, and speaks to a lifetime of work. Always Now,
Vol. 3 is a clear bell of a book from one of Canada’s most important
poets.

Citation

Avison, Margaret., “Always Now: The Collected Poems, Vol. 3,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed February 18, 2025, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/16355.