From Amazon
Tim Lilburn is one of our only living authors capable of writing spiritually charged nature poetry that genuinely works. Most writers who attempt this sort of thing produce flaky, decorative, and empty verse. Kill-site, on the other hand, is an incredibly rich book, a cycle of poems that gives its readers a linguistic experience that one might encounter on a camping trip in northern Saskatchewan in the company of Thomas Merton, William Blake, Gary Snyder, and Sheila Watson.
Kill-site is one of Lilburn's more difficult books, for his eclectic and (to the average reader) obscure readings are on flamboyant display: medieval Christian monasticism and mysticism, Socratic philosophy, Chinese and Japanese philosophy and poetry, and modern cinema are locked in a metaphysical dialogue with the land of the northern prairie. In a typical passage
Plato is talking with John Scotus Eriugena; a young woman, asleep in her
back of the throat body, from a class in advanced poetry; Julian of Norwich,
with her neck-bell of blood; Isaac of Stella and The Cloud of Unknowing;
they've come in off the range for the night and are under the ground,
whickering orange-winged grasshoppers around them,
dust, an angry stray dog, a buffalo-scented, mudfooted moon.
To unravel this sort of verse it is necessary to trust the author absolutely, and as a result Kill-site is not an ideal introduction to Lilburn's work. Readers who haven't encountered him before should try his 1999 collection, To the River, which showcases his rich and sensuous lyrical style without being quite so philosophically abstruse. Longtime Lilburn-readers, however, will find Kill-site to be one of his most challenging, vivid, and satisfying books. --Jack Illingworth
Review
"The uniqueness of [Kill-site] rests in its eerily mystical descriptions of the natural world.…Rhapsodic.…Lilburn's insights [are] fresh and arresting."
–Quill & Quire
“Lilburn’s contemplative language has a resonant beauty.”
–Montreal Gazette
–Quill & Quire
“Lilburn’s contemplative language has a resonant beauty.”
–Montreal Gazette
Book Description
By the winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Best Book of the Year
To his virtuoso collection of new poems, Tim Lilburn brings a philosopher’s mind and the eyes and ears of a marsh hawk. This series of earthy meditations makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Lilburn’s close study of goldenrod, an ice sheet, or night opens into surprising interior and subterranean worlds. Pythagoras lurks within the poplars, Socrates in stones, people fly below the ground. Elsewhere, the human presence of motels and beer parlours is ominous. Kill-site is an exploration of a human’s animal nature. Lilburn invites the reader to: “Go below the small things… then / walk inside them and you have their kindness.” Though a natural progression from Lilburn’s last book, To the River, in Kill-site, the poet moves toward a greater understanding of the human, of sacrifice.
To his virtuoso collection of new poems, Tim Lilburn brings a philosopher’s mind and the eyes and ears of a marsh hawk. This series of earthy meditations makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Lilburn’s close study of goldenrod, an ice sheet, or night opens into surprising interior and subterranean worlds. Pythagoras lurks within the poplars, Socrates in stones, people fly below the ground. Elsewhere, the human presence of motels and beer parlours is ominous. Kill-site is an exploration of a human’s animal nature. Lilburn invites the reader to: “Go below the small things… then / walk inside them and you have their kindness.” Though a natural progression from Lilburn’s last book, To the River, in Kill-site, the poet moves toward a greater understanding of the human, of sacrifice.
From the Back Cover
"The uniqueness of [Kill-site] rests in its eerily mystical descriptions of the natural world.…Rhapsodic.…Lilburn's insights [are] fresh and arresting."
–Quill & Quire
“Lilburn’s contemplative language has a resonant beauty.”
–Montreal Gazette
–Quill & Quire
“Lilburn’s contemplative language has a resonant beauty.”
–Montreal Gazette
About the Author
Tim Lilburn was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. He has published six poetry collections, including Kill-site (2003), winner of the Governor General’s Award; To the River (1999), winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Book of the Year; Moosewood Sandhills (1994), winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry; and Tourist To Ecstasy (1989), a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. His poems have been widely anthologized. He now lives in British Columbia, where he teaches at the University of Victoria.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Shouting
I meet Louise, and I’ve got the Platform Sutra
of the Sixth Patriarch in the bag the Taoist nun at Xining told me
would always feed me luck, the one with the yellow-green bird
streaming from mere being.
On the lefthand side of Hui Neng’s book, old characters like the lost forest
north of Chang’an, people moving in it, soft-mouthed older people,
catching birds with long poles and string.
We go to see The Apostle, Robert Duvall.
In the film, Duvall has Motion balled in his hand: he looks at it then
us, quickly, back and forth through the film.
Duvall’s on a roll; what he’s doing is rhythmic and ugly; he’s
always musical, bucking, but you can’t be sure what you see
inside. Sometimes a room that someone’s just left,
sometimes a garden of machines.
I want to write about human brightness coming into the world, out of
the water in the ground and into the world.
Hiddenness appears in everything.
It lifts out of the chest of everything toward you, elm
shade, wheat, a river, late grass.
Come in, it says. Where have you been?
You could say that when Louise and I sit
there watching the film we are being
thought by the dark.
It says what it needs to say.
The tongue casts its shadow but the mouth is bright.
A Word about the Poem by Tim Lilburn
In “Shouting,” I go to a film with the poet Louise Halfe. It’s The Apostle, where Robert Duvall plays a fundamentalist preacher of uncontrolled conviction and barely controlled violence. Louise comes out of residential school; I am an ex-Jesuit; it seems to me that Duvall had some fierce religion in his past. None of this information appears in the poem, but it adds pressure. As we, two friends, watch the spectacle — Duvall shouting — the night moves around us: some large thinking is breaking up like ice sheets on the river.
How the Poem Works by A. J. Levin
Tim Lilburn is often compared to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Both were Jesuits, and both favour taut lines in which no word is extraneous. Less obviously, “Shouting” may be read as a Shakespearean sonnet. It may not have the traditional rhythms or rhyming patterns, but it contains strong similarities to Shakespeare’s idea of the role of a sonnet.
The first part of the poem sets up two apparently contrary groupings. Louise, antiquity, Taoism, grace, books, femininity, and the East are opposed to the poet, modernity, Southern Baptism, ugliness, film, masculinity, and the West. Yet this part of the poem, with its extraordinarily long lines, replicates the effect of a sacred text from either tradition, of Chinese monks meditating aloud or of Duvall’s preacher spinning his spiel. This anticipates the poem’s conclusion, which, like a Shakespearean sonnet, contains the reconciliation of opposites. This reconciliation, again, as in Shakespeare, comes about through the friendship of two dissimilar yet alike minds.
The poem’s crucial line, “Hiddenness appears in everything,” bridges the apposed groupings, and philosophy (even Nietzsche’s atheism) and faith. The line recalls Deuteronomy 29:29, reminding that God is unseen yet everywhere, an embodiment of the balancing concepts of yin and yang fundamental to Taoism. This idea is reinforced by the beautiful last line, in which the mouth and tongue — female and male analogues — adopt each other’s characteristics.
A. J. Levin’s book, Monks’ Fruit, was nominated for the 2005 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.
I meet Louise, and I’ve got the Platform Sutra
of the Sixth Patriarch in the bag the Taoist nun at Xining told me
would always feed me luck, the one with the yellow-green bird
streaming from mere being.
On the lefthand side of Hui Neng’s book, old characters like the lost forest
north of Chang’an, people moving in it, soft-mouthed older people,
catching birds with long poles and string.
We go to see The Apostle, Robert Duvall.
In the film, Duvall has Motion balled in his hand: he looks at it then
us, quickly, back and forth through the film.
Duvall’s on a roll; what he’s doing is rhythmic and ugly; he’s
always musical, bucking, but you can’t be sure what you see
inside. Sometimes a room that someone’s just left,
sometimes a garden of machines.
I want to write about human brightness coming into the world, out of
the water in the ground and into the world.
Hiddenness appears in everything.
It lifts out of the chest of everything toward you, elm
shade, wheat, a river, late grass.
Come in, it says. Where have you been?
You could say that when Louise and I sit
there watching the film we are being
thought by the dark.
It says what it needs to say.
The tongue casts its shadow but the mouth is bright.
A Word about the Poem by Tim Lilburn
In “Shouting,” I go to a film with the poet Louise Halfe. It’s The Apostle, where Robert Duvall plays a fundamentalist preacher of uncontrolled conviction and barely controlled violence. Louise comes out of residential school; I am an ex-Jesuit; it seems to me that Duvall had some fierce religion in his past. None of this information appears in the poem, but it adds pressure. As we, two friends, watch the spectacle — Duvall shouting — the night moves around us: some large thinking is breaking up like ice sheets on the river.
How the Poem Works by A. J. Levin
Tim Lilburn is often compared to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Both were Jesuits, and both favour taut lines in which no word is extraneous. Less obviously, “Shouting” may be read as a Shakespearean sonnet. It may not have the traditional rhythms or rhyming patterns, but it contains strong similarities to Shakespeare’s idea of the role of a sonnet.
The first part of the poem sets up two apparently contrary groupings. Louise, antiquity, Taoism, grace, books, femininity, and the East are opposed to the poet, modernity, Southern Baptism, ugliness, film, masculinity, and the West. Yet this part of the poem, with its extraordinarily long lines, replicates the effect of a sacred text from either tradition, of Chinese monks meditating aloud or of Duvall’s preacher spinning his spiel. This anticipates the poem’s conclusion, which, like a Shakespearean sonnet, contains the reconciliation of opposites. This reconciliation, again, as in Shakespeare, comes about through the friendship of two dissimilar yet alike minds.
The poem’s crucial line, “Hiddenness appears in everything,” bridges the apposed groupings, and philosophy (even Nietzsche’s atheism) and faith. The line recalls Deuteronomy 29:29, reminding that God is unseen yet everywhere, an embodiment of the balancing concepts of yin and yang fundamental to Taoism. This idea is reinforced by the beautiful last line, in which the mouth and tongue — female and male analogues — adopt each other’s characteristics.
A. J. Levin’s book, Monks’ Fruit, was nominated for the 2005 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.
