Poetry
Winter Sun
Margaret Avison · 1960
Synopsis
A first collection of introspective poems, mostly in free verse, turned towards belief and moral knowledge. It opens with The Apex Animal and closes with The Agnes Cleves Papers. In Snow, one of its best-known pieces, nobody stuffs the world in your eyes: the optic heart must venture out, escape as from a prison and recreate. Thaw shows the city at the thaw, puddles in the roadway, a boy and his hockey stick.
Context
The book appeared in 1960 in Toronto, from the University of Toronto Press, and in London from Routledge & Kegan Paul; its author was forty-one or forty-two years old and had been publishing verse since the late twenties, in student magazines, in the press and then in Poetry. Britannica dates the start of work on the collection to 1956, during a stay in Chicago as a Guggenheim fellow. The later books, written after 1963, are more accessible according to the Canadian Encyclopedia.
Who it is for
A collection of real difficulty, with tight sentences, which calls for slow reading, line by line.
Prizes and reception
Governor General's Award for poetry for 1960, for the first book of a poet who came to be seen as difficult and introspective.
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