Fact-based journalism that sparks the Canadian conversation

Articles Business Environment Health Politics Arts & Culture Society

Special Series Hope You’re Well For the Love of the Game Living Rooms In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration Terra Cognita More special series >

For the Love of the Game

In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration

More special series >

Events The Walrus Talks The Walrus Video Room The Walrus Leadership Roundtables The Walrus Leadership Forums Article Club

The Walrus Video Room

The Walrus Leadership Roundtables

The Walrus Leadership Forums

Subscribe Renew your subscription Change your address Magazine Issues Newsletters Podcasts

Renew your subscription

The Walrus Lab Hire The Walrus Lab Amazon First Novel Award

Amazon First Novel Award

Everybody Knows Poets Are Weird. Margaret Avison Was Weirder

Scandalously, no press wanted to publish her long-awaited biography

Everybody knows poets are weird. The turtlenecks, the notebooks, the opium, the daffodils: it’s all a bit much. But even by poetic standards, Margaret Avison was an odd duck.

Acutely self-conscious and often physically fragile, she lived with such intense inwardness that even other writers were perturbed. A self-described hermit, she travelled infrequently. She had few indulgences beyond cigarettes. Devoted to her parents, she was rarely more than a train ride from them. She had no spouse, no children, no pet. The novelist Sheila Watson remembered her as being “deathly pale.” The critic Northrop Frye called her “a conscientious objector to life.”

Yet Avison, who died almost twenty years ago, was also one of Canada’s most extraordinary authors. More often than not, her poems rework biblical chapter and verse. Obsessed by the workings of mind and soul, they stretch syntax like elastic and cram allusions into a handful of words. Teeming with puns and newly minted compounds—and admittedly sometimes inscrutable—her poems brave what she called “[t]he mysterious, and more ample, further waters” of spiritual inquiry. The question is, does anyone care?

In Optic Heart, the first comprehensive account of Avison’s life, David A. Kent examines her days in microscopic detail. His title comes from one of her most famous poems, the sonnet “Snow”: “Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes. / The optic heart must venture: a jail-break, / And re-creation.” (She explained that the passage means the “whole person responding,” or “seeing with your heart.”) A long-time Avison scholar, Kent shares what was once the consensus view that her poetry, bold in style and assured in its religious conviction, is some of the best yet written in this country: “Her pre-eminent status in Canadian literature is already secure, but I believe that her reputation and standing will only grow as the real dimensions of her achievement are more fully appreciated.”

I’m not so sure. Kent’s book is a scholarly triumph, but his portrait obliges us to take a stern look at our literary history. Do Avison’s enigmatic poems speak to readers today, or are they vestiges of a past we’ve left behind? Whatever the answer, one fact about Optic Heart remains scandalous: no one wanted to publish it.

More than forty years in the making, Optic Heart is a cradle-to-grave biography. Or will be: the second instalment is scheduled for 2028. Volume One ends in 1977, when Avison was not yet sixty. She lived another thirty years, writing all the while, before dying in 2007 of complications from a broken hip.

Kent follows the narrative established by Avison’s autobiography, the posthumous I Am Here and Not Not-There. I use the word “narrative” loosely. Despite its innermost intensity, Avison’s life was uneventful. Her friendships with most writers seemed relatively free of acrimony. She had an infatuation or two, and she may even have been in love with the American poet John Frederick Nims. Kent downplays a rumoured dalliance with the Canadian poet A. J. M. Smith. “More than once,” as Kent writes, marriage was broached and awkwardly dismissed. (Avison was awkward to the core.) But little evidence suggests that she had much acquaintance with the themes—romance, passion, heartbreak—that have preoccupied lyric poets since the first lyre was strung. Optic Heart is so chaste that I got excited by a reference to Essex County.

Avison was born in Galt, Ontario, on April 23, 1918. She was a “PK,” a Methodist........

© The Walrus