Concrete and Wild Carrot

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

The judges knew what they were doing when they awarded Margaret Avison
the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize for Concrete and Wild Carrot: it confirms
her standing as one of Canada’s finest poets. In a time when so many
poets call themselves “religious” or “spiritual,” her work
stands out for its toughness, its subtlety of vision, and its superior
craft.

Avison has long been recognized as a poet of extraordinary complexity,
although, like the parables she often alludes to, her poems speak with
an apparent simplicity of language. It’s the syntax, the way the words
are organized, that calls a reader back again and again to apprehend if
not comprehend her invocation of the world Christ the Artist has made.
These poems explore the aging heart that still ventures, and the world,
mostly that of Toronto, both as it was and as it now is, through which
she makes her way.

Most of the poems are parables, lyric tales of spiritual exploration of
God’s world, made that we, that a poet such as she, might see it plain
and praise it. Avison’s poetic is austere, for which we may be
grateful, so she does not push her self at us, but rather finds ways to
make us see, with her, the world as it is. For her it is a kind of
glory, God-given, but readers can take pleasure in it as written,
whether or not they share her faith. And while she can still write a
poem of prayer like “Leading Questions,” which concludes with the
Herbert-like “and long since He has promised to prepare / for us the
robe He hopes His guests will wear,” she will also still, in
“Alternative to Riots but All Citizens Must Play,” “Cry out
‘Break!’ Break / all our securities, and break out! / Explore only
the ranges / beyond our mastering.”

It’s that exploratory demand, that insistence that the heart continue
to see all the world, and respond, that fuels these poems, and makes of
them a gift to all readers.