Moosewood Sandhills

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University.

Tim Lilburn, author of Names of God (1986) and Tourist to Ecstasy
(1989), is a contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins. While Hopkins found his
muse in the mountainous landscapes of Wales, Lilburn draws his
inspiration from the Moosehead Sandhills, “a large rise of hummocky
aspen land on either side of the South Saskatchewan River about a
hundred miles south-west of the confluence with the North
Saskatchewan.”

The poet sleeps in a coyote’s burrow and in a root cellar; he awakes
in all seasons, watches and finds that seeing is waiting “for the
gold-tipped deer / to come and incense you with the fragrance of their
stare.” Lilburn tells us that, while he stayed in the Moosehead
Sandhills, “[l]ooking with care and desire seemed like a political
act”—an act of active negotiation: “You could hold your beautiful
gaze like a hand out to the world, say / ‘here, pup,’ and it’d
come.”

Lilburn is uncomfortably at home in the paradoxical world of his poems:
“I am seduced by the shapeliness / of the failure of knowledge.” At
the same time he writes, “Knowing is a bowing, a covering of your
face, before the world.” Who could ask for more?