The publication of Listening, a posthumous collection gathering Margaret Avison's final meditations penned prior to her July, 2007, death, will no doubt provide readers seeking cultural solace and poetic justice with cause for celebratory applause, as in Foretaste, Canadian:
I have seen the valley trees
receive Your
bud-breaking, slowly savour
golden-green life in
late April's balmy
foreglimpse of
summertime's benefice:
shadows' touch, for little
us “like trees walking” to
receive as do the trees in
lavish springtime's
early first-green im-
pulse.
Astute readers, such as Michael W. Higgins, president of Fredericton's St. Thomas University, who has long championed Avison as a true poet who celebrates God and doesn't compromise her art in so doing, will, of course, immediately catch the reference to Mark 8:24 (King James Version) with Avison's pointed quotation marks hugging the phrase “like trees walking,” a simile both timely and timeless, given Higgins's abiding reverence for Avison's sapientially attuned verse, which he describes as drawing heavily upon “the Christian narrative, a detailed familiarity with the Scriptures and an enlightened appreciation of doctrine.”
Listening: Last Poems, by Margaret Avison, McClelland & Stewart, 80 pages, $17.99
The radiant authority of Avison's art, everywhere on display in this affective as well as effective volume, derives from a life spent observing, assimilating, listening and, most crucially, taking note of all that fills her senses. She opens her heart to the universe and, in so doing, finds fulfilment within its wondrous and often incomprehensibly wicked ways. Whether meditating upon the execution of Saddam Hussein or recalling her own mischievous rivalry with a five-year-old neighbour, Avison unflinchingly drives straight to the centre of that which makes us most vulnerable and most valued, even as we struggle to overcome (or come to terms with) either unspeakable brutality or equally commensurate beauty located in both the diurnal and nocturnal ways of our world. From Pilgrim:
As the Creator made
every orb and places
where they could roll, and every
ocean, each with its beaches and
promontories so there could be
land greening day by day,
at peace in the dark hours, He
saw that it was good.
Clearly, Avison's work ranges far more widely and drinks far more deeply of the so-called Pierian Spring than a cursory or fragmentary first reading might suggest. Her seamlessly sly and tiny tributes to poets, philosophers and seeker-teachers she clearly admired – Earle Birney, Emily Dickinson, Ecclesiastes, Gerard Manley Hopkins et al. – register almost subliminally in the minds of those willing to engage with work that moves effortlessly among several modes of expression and layers of meaning, which both work and play with perceptions and misconceptions of what it means to truly listen to that which begins at the edge of one's very human skin.
In such a world view, despair simply cannot exist, even in those darkest nights of the soul, a fact that suggests Avison's hopeful and near-incantatory lyrical forays into the fabulous, fecund or simply heightened familiar honour the responsibility of the gift He granted her, and allow her to share it so selflessly with others. If absence equals presence, in other words, no voice is more urgently among us even as it disappears between the lines of her endlessly compassionate and keenly reflexive human/e POV.
An original, an authentic visionary without the flashily splashy trappings so often accorded those whose egos impose themselves upon others in their dubiously designated “poetry,” Avison praises Creation in all its transplendent awesome/awful mutations; her themes and concerns, though anchored in the cyclical or quotidian, invariably transcend same, particularly where she simply stops, turns, looks, sees and, yes, freely listens to all that was, is and shall be (above and beyond the call of beauty). From Ever Greens:
Glory, glory to the
eternal Who,
creator of trees; the ones with
lanky dark green
leaves; delicate others of an
as-if-petalled leafiness, these
tip and dance
in the merest breath ...
Michael Higgins notes that “Canada can ill afford to ignore a voice as sublime” as Avison's, a highly imaginative voice, sans façon, that did not perish with her departure for points elsewhere for the duration, thanks largely to what he calls “her ineradicable legacy.”
I second that.
Judith Fitzgerald is guest poetry blogger for In Other Words. Her 30th book, Points Elsewhere, will be published next year.
