(1961)
Winter Sun is an appropriate title for the first book of collected poems by Margaret Avison, a Canadian poet of already considerable standing. The title, like so many of the poems themselves, is not merely what it seems. One might, at first glance, take it as a hint about the prevailing mood of the contents, and it does indeed evoke the bleak sombre bareness of the Toronto watery-sunlight winters that provide material for much in the book. But although Miss Avison’s light is a winter light, it is still the sun: a particular sun which is capable of rendering immediate appearance transparent as the glass of a lens.
One always runs the danger, when speaking of a poet’s “reality beyond the finite,” of branding the poet as a floaty-footed and cloudy-headed mystic whose vision, although it may be directed upwards, tends to encounter nothing but fog. (In Toronto, of course, the fog has at least some relation to actual experience.) To identify Miss Avison with this cliché would be sticking the label on the wrong bottle. She has her feet firmly on the ground (usually the “cinder mash” or “cool tar” of the city poems); her vision is always focused to, and through, specific concrete reality rather than past it. Again, if one praises a poet’s descriptive powers, one risks conveying the image of a housewife cooking up a poem (of the Oh Beautiful Sunset or Hooray For Autumn variety) by applying adjectives to an object like icing to a cake, with the same result: if one swallows much of it, one feels a little ill. But Miss Avison never slathers her poems. Her use of descriptive words is not only precise and striking, but so precise and striking that the words do not just describe the object but are the object: there are other tennis players in both art and life, but her tennis players, “albinos bonded in their flick and flow,” are the only ones of their kind.
She pares her works to the core, and throws out all extraneous and diluting verbal peelings. The result of this critical cutting and sorting is a highly condensed poetic texture which demands a lot of conscious concentration on the part of the reader. For example:
… The even-bread
Of earth smokes rainbows. Blind stars and swallows parade
the windy sky of streets
and cheering beats
down faintly, to leaves in sticks, insects in pleats
and pouches hidden
and micro-garden….
Winter Sun is not a chocolate-covered poetic pill, guaranteed to taste nice, go down easily, and eliminate all need for effort. Such sweetness would be useless in its universe:
Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes.
The optic heart must venture: a jail-break
And re-creation.
Miss Avison portrays consciousness as an attempt to encounter and to form a relationship with the external; the ultimate locus of such an encounter is the individual human mind, which makes its ordered cosmos out of a chaos which includes bits of society, scraps of sense perception, snips of science, moments of history, chips of myth, and the elbowings of the insistent self, as well as the phenomena of the natural universe. Her ordered structure is built of various poetic forms, among them simple lyric stanzas, unconventional sonnets, blank verse, and highly disciplined irregular lines which avoid the free and all-too-easy idiom of the contemporary common denominator. Her verbal wit is considerable, but never coy; her humour subtle, sometimes ironic, but always wise; her human warmth (a warmth which is connected with a strong sense of nostalgia) is most evident in the last, longest, and most definitely not least poem, “The Agnes Cleves Papers.”
In the last analysis, the poetic eye sees its own world, a world which both reflects and transcends the formlessness of the finite world outside, and reality becomes internal:
… Gentle and just pleasure
It is, being human, to have won from space
This unchill, habitable interior
Which mirrors quietly the light
Of the snow, and the new year.
Winter Sun is a book not to be read, on any account, just once.