To the River is a beautifully crafted gathering of poems. Turning and returning to the banks of the South Saskatchewan River, it is a compelling meditation conducted in the presence of a particular landscape. With great metaphorical muscle, the poems move towards the inhabitants of that riverscape, which remains rich with a sense of the strangeness inside the familiarity of willow, geese, river ice, coyote, snowberry. It is not just the satisfaction of aesthetic accomplishment which gives the book its compulsive energy, but the persistence of the seeker’s desire for what eludes even our strongest acts of language. Contemplative and spare, spiritual and sensual, To the River is a poetry of praise, a love poem to the earth, a prayer, and a journal of interior practice. It is a collection written by a poet moving into the full stretch of his power.
TIM LILBURN lives in the Bowker Creek watershed in W̱SÁNEĆ territory on Vancouver Island. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Harmonia Mundi, The House of Charlemagne, and The Names. His poetry has received the Governor General’s Award, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the European Medal of Poetry and Art (the Homer Medal), the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award and the Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence, among other prizes. His poetry has been translated widely. Lilburn is also the author of three earlier essay collections, Living In The World As If It Were Home, Going Home, and The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place, and editor of two other influential books on poetics. A fourth essay collection, Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change, appeared from the University of Alberta Press in 2023. He has taught at the University of Victoria, the University of Saskatchewan, St. Peter’s College and Middlebury College, and worked with the dance company New Dance Horizons/Rouge-gorge as a writer and performer, collaborating with co-directors Edward Poitras and Robin Poitras.
