Poetry. Heartfelt looking and attentive listening are newly advocated and demonstrated in CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT. The poems in this book are startlingly youthful. The words leap with life, whether the subject be Avison's beloved Toronto byways, with their population of dogs, kids, oaks, firs, squirrels, ants, and human citizens, or her surprising probes of the Bible. Jesus is a model, for instance, a poet who "among us. found encrusted words and structures; / he washed and brushed them clean / and out of the intractability / of history learned by rote / stepped, in simplicity the exemplar." Margaret Avison's own distinctive words and structures, her clean approaches to an "odd intransigent openness" paradoxically comfort the reader with a smack of the limitless. There is no complacency here, just the best kind of large minded company in the still-heroic venture of thinking Outside and the hard, crucial discipline of wording it.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Concrete and Wild Carrot is quintessential Avison, undiminished by age (she is 84), still probing ... the wonders of language itself. -- National Post, January 18, 2003, review by Robyn Sarah
One of our living greats - her work -- its moral depth, humanity, transcendent intelligence and sheer power... -- Globe and Mail, June 21, 2003, review by Ken Babstock
The pairing of [concrete and wild carrot]... aptly symbolizes the collection itself, which delights in paradox. -- Toronto Star, December 15, 2002, review by Barbara Carey
Toronto Star, December 15, 2002, review by Barbara Carey
The poems here are deceptively accessible but open to multiple readings. -- Quill & Quire, January 2003, review by Patrick Woodcock
One of our living greats - her work -- its moral depth, humanity, transcendent intelligence and sheer power... -- Globe and Mail, June 21, 2003, review by Ken Babstock
The pairing of [concrete and wild carrot]... aptly symbolizes the collection itself, which delights in paradox. -- Toronto Star, December 15, 2002, review by Barbara Carey
Toronto Star, December 15, 2002, review by Barbara Carey
The poems here are deceptively accessible but open to multiple readings. -- Quill & Quire, January 2003, review by Patrick Woodcock
From the Publisher
The C$80,000 Griffin Poetry Prize is the most lucrative poetry prize in the world for a single volume of poetry. It awarded annually for the two best books out of three Canadian books and four international books.
The judges' citation for this book reads:
"If beauty, as Alfred North Whitehead defines it, is ‘a quality which finds its exemplification in actual occasions,' and if beauty is more completely exemplified in ‘imperfection and discord' than in the ‘perfection of harmony,' then Margaret Avison's Concrete and Wild Carrot is an occasion of beauty. Avison's poetry is also alive in its sublimity and its humility: ‘wonder, readiness, simplicity' – the gifts of perception Avison attributes to her Christian faith – imbue every poem in this book with a rare spirit of disorderly love. Margaret Avison is a national treasure. For many decades she has forged a way to write, against the grain, some of the most humane, sweet and profound poetry of our time."
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