Listening: last poems
by Margaret Avison
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009, ISBN 9780771008863, 80 pp., $17.99 paper.

Almost two years after her death in 2007 Margaret Avison surprises her readers with another gift. Listening gathers together the last work of this remarkable octogenarian. The sheer vitality of her work is astonishing. Those features of Avison's writing that have always characterized her art--keen engagement with the world, sharp and wise wit, and mastery of the art of poetry--are strongly evident and seemingly undiminished. Also evident is the unassuming way she counts God in, as creator of the natural world, in human history and always in her thinking.

In the 1960s Avison with a class of her students concluded that poetry "required from the reader the same creative energy as from the writer." These new poems too demand, and deserve, careful reading.

Avison possessed a formidable intellect, but when she set her poetic mind to work on the failings and foibles of the human race she brought compassion and wisdom to the table as well. The long poem, "Our ? Kind," (38) begins with a description of "A/ murderous tyrant brought to book,/ he shouted down his ac-/ cuser," goes on to relate a cruel childhood naughtiness ("I knew I had been bad") and ends with the dilemma of dealing with a destructive raccoon ("This calls for something more than caging overnight.") The poem does not solve the problem of evil--and responsibility for it--but draws the reader in to grapple with it.

Although she admits that "Old age too is an unfestive interlude," Avison is able to celebrate when ". . . once,/ again ice-rinks resonate/ with bright dazzle, blades and thuds." (Slow Breathing, 76), or when a pear tree branch:

launched, instantly, a
whirl of little ones. They
twittered and piped and gurgled all
at once, each with its
colourful cravat or patch or
crest.
(Other, 62)

Her capacity for playfulness shines when she describes the March sun "mounted toward the zenith, one/shone-in shaft/ played, puss by puss/ slowly up/ the southmost stalk of the/ pussy willows." (A Lingering Touch, 11), or when she selects words that are singular or singularly stretched: levigating, itemizables, unpredictables, timelessnesses, multiplicitous, obstreperousnesses.

Her contagious delight in words, firmly undergirded by her skill in placing them on the line, is evident when she points out that the root of "abominable" is "omen," (19) or when she admits:

I like the word
"particulate." Its dictionary
meaning has slipped my mind. But
do let's have a cluster of
particulates that I can dance among, with castanets.
(Two Whoms or I'm in Two minds, 7)

But however engaged with life, these poems also anticipate its ending, not with fear or regret, but with faith that:

the last-of-light is, once-
for-all, the new
threshold.
(Slow Breathing, 77)

Avison imagines what lies ahead in unsentimental, concrete terms of house construction:

Your blueprint, all
Your servants: archi-
tects, dry-wall men, brick-
layers (or stone-
masons) and gem-
cutters, each one's
developed art or craft
wholeheartedly
realizing Your so long
unworked, perfect design!
(Heaven, 34)

We cherish the final words spoken by a loved one no longer with us. Listening offers us the last lines of a poet who was and remains, in the often-repeated words of a Giller jury, our "national treasure."

Sarah Klassen is a Winnipeg poet, fiction writer, editor and, occasionally, teacher.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.


Back to Reviews Index