Names of Gods

Brian Burch is a teacher, writer and poet and author of Still Under the
Thumb.

Tim Lilburn’s first book, Names of Gods, is strongly influenced by the best poets of the l950s. Long passages of images developing from images grow from some simple root into something grand, an image too deep to hold all its meaning.

Like most beat poets, Lilburn’s poems seem trapped on the page. Efforts to indicate long passages of “om” and “o” sounds limit some of the effectiveness of tones but because we are responding to the printed word we are imposing ourselves on his poems and perhaps changing them from what the poet would have intended.

Lilburn is at his best in his disciplined shorter poems, such as “Waking from Neuton’s sleep.” Here his crisp language and very disciplined use of the free verse form are at their most effective. I am curious as to what he might accomplish with the haiku form, given the direction of his writing.

Structurally, Names of Gods is composed of five chapbook-length segments, each section dealing with a specific theme. Lilburn doesn’t make the reader’s task easier by naming each segment. One has to read all the poems in a section to understand the unifying aspects of the segment’s poems.

Lilburn’s Names of Gods is one of many recent collections of poetry that seem to be based on western religious and spiritual traditions. The usage of such image is not dogmatic but an effort to find a common language to challenge commonly-held views. Names of Gods is not a guide to spiritual harmony but a forceful challenge to the ways death, nature, life, and the divine are frequently dealt with. It is an antidote to the new-age spirituality and poetry.

Lilburn assumes that his readers are well educated. Many of his concepts are based on the writings of people as varied as Adam Smith and St Augustine. This can create a barrier between the writer and the reader but Lilburn manages to cross these barriers by presenting potentially obscure concepts in easily assimilated images.

I enjoyed reading Names of Gods. I look forward to reading more collections from Tim Lilburn.