Orphic Politics.

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

Tim Lilburn is a powerfully original poet. His work has become steadily more esoteric, drawing heavily on Platonism, neo-Platonism and gnosticism as a background for deploring the destruction of the environment. In one line the reader may encounter Proclus, pseudo-Dionysius, and Iamblichus, with no real context for understanding them: allusions are one thing, name-dropping another. It is peculiar to find Pythagoras described as a “defrocked Wal-Mart greeter” when the direction of the irony is unclear.

The poems are dense with brilliant images and they make voluptuous use of the long line, although the style sometimes verges on a private language. Lilburn is especially fond of hyphenated constructions and he frequently turns nouns into verbs.

William Butler Yeats once said that Ezra Pound often seemed to be translating at sight from an unknown Greek masterpiece, a description that applies to much of Lilburn. Yeats went on to praise the strain of real nobility in Pound. Lilburn sometimes achieves the high prophetic strain in these poems, in works like “Swan Plain” and “I Will Serve.” But he is in danger of leaving his readers behind.