Kill-Site

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.

Kill-Site is the third in Lilburn’s series dealing with the landscape
around the South Saskatchewan River near Muenster, Saskatchewan.
Lilburn’s blend of sharp nature writing with a pervasive spirituality
informed by the ascetic teachings of the early Christian theologians
raises his work well above ordinary nature writing. Here and there, the
appropriation of Greek philosophical and theological terms like kenosis
will puzzle readers who don’t know the earlier books. No one but
Lilburn could describe a fox and also see it as “Abaris the
Thracian” (a figure out of Plato) or “John of Nyassa,” a
fourth-century Christian thinker! Lilburn’s style gets steadily more
complex, his lines more elaborate. He has picked up some obtrusive
mannerisms (like the use of compound words created with hyphens) from
the American poet Charles Wright. Lilburn’s books of the last decade
are a continuing inquiry into the problem of how to inhabit this land
without greed and abuse.