Concrete and Wild Carrot [Paperback]

Followers of Margaret Avison's work won't find many surprises in her Griffin Prize-nominated collection, Concrete and Wild Carrot. The elegies for departed friends, sincere and unsentimental Christian lyrics, and keen-eyed urban reflections of earlier works like No Time are all here. Most of these poems are brief free verse lyrics, written in seemingly plain language that is always aware of its history--Avison is a poet best read with the O.E.D. within easy reach. Readers unfamiliar with her verse should attempt to imagine a poetry that incorporates Geoffrey Hill's mind for Christian abstraction and dramatization, P.K. Page's sense of prosody, and something of George Bowering's line (Bowering considers Avison to be among Canada's finest poets).

An absolute faith in Christianity is fundamental to Concrete and Wild Carrot, and readers who are resistant to sincere religion in contemporary writing may find themselves resisting Avison's poems. She frequently portrays God as the author or artist of the universe, with temporal art occupying a vital but subordinate position. Languages, however, are gifts from God that shape their writers and speakers:

Hebrew's ornate iron, its quirks around the line
(vocal or consonant) in you have wrought
the odd intransigent openness--and untaught
much we grew up to mimic--or disdain.

Concrete and Wild Carrot threatens to be just a nice little collection, but Avison is far too intelligent and aware of the world's woes to allow that to happen. The final poem in the book, "Alternative to Riots / but All Citizens Must Play" is an overt call for peaceful anarchism, for the destruction of all social fictions to the greater glory of God and humanity. It's stirring stuff, and will make anyone look over Avison's poems with a keener, more revolutionary eye. --Jack Illingworth

For half a century, Margaret Avison has been among Canada's most gifted and elusive literary figures. With P.K. Page, she shares the distinction of being one of our few remaining high modernists whose work is still vital and developing. Her subject matter—the evolution of the creative self, the awakening of spiritual awareness, the artist caught within the dizzying swirl of a natural and historical continuum—remind us of a time when writers had a grander sense of their purpose. Avison's true contribution to Canadian writing is not primarily found in her subject matter, though, it is in her poetic style, which is famously tangled, knotted and textured—so much so that one experiences the thrill of revelation each time the code of a poem is cracked, and the truth of the thing, like the meat of the proverbial tough nut, may finally be enjoyed.
That is why readers should celebrate the arrival of Concrete and Wild Carrot, a beautifully designed collection proving that Avison, in her mid-80s, still has the power to contain and encode multitudes. In the explanatory notes and acknowledgements of the volume, we learn that Avison is now living in a seniors' residence and that her poems are written on loose pieces of paper, which others then gather and key into a computer. These circumstances are worth mentioning not only because they are unique, but because they place the profound achievement of the collection into perspective.
Particularly noteworthy is the poem "Other Oceans", an 11-page extended narrative masterfully encompassing Creation, inspiration, and the path toward authentic worship, with a scope and energy reminiscent of Wallace Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction". The poem begins ambitiously, imagining the evolutionary sweep of the beginning of time: "When the convulsive earth / arched under the sea" into "a fraction of second of the one day that's a thousand years." Within this panoramic opening, Avison positions the creative impulse as that which enables the artist to aspire toward renewal and re-creation: "Where is the holy / vanishing-point / where life began and daily may/ bring us alive again?" As the poem draws toward a conclusion, Avison positions God within the daily effort to re-imagine the original creative urge: "one artist who, in one / impulse once called out, from surging / waters and fires and molten / rock our earth, our little lives, // maintains, Himself, / the no longer appearing / structures." It is common for writers today to re-imagine biblical stories in a contemporary context, but few have the imaginative and linguistic competence to breathe new life into Creation itself.
Harold Heft (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

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

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

The poems here are deceptively accessible but open to multiple readings. -- Quill & Quire, January 2003, review by Patrick Woodcock