Concrete and Wild Carrot

WINNER OF THE 2003 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZEIn Margaret Avison's new poems, little pleasures are bound up with larger ones.Her slightest subjects-beloved Toronto parks with their population of oaks, firs, squirrels, dogs, kids, even ants, and the minutest sighs of her contemporary urban soundscape-all have their being within an immense composition that calls and hauls us to a largeness, a category-breaking "always unthinkable" beyond. "Words have their life too, won't/ compact into a theorem," Avison says, and this is certainly true of hers. "To myself everywhere: Cry out, "Break!" Break all our securities, and break out! Explore only the ranges beyond our mastering. Take on the inexorable demands made by a norm of unpremeditated excellence!"-from "Alternatives to Riots but all Citizens Must Play"Concrete and Wild Carrot is Margaret Avison's sixth book of poems, her first with Brick Books-though we now distribute her Lancelot Press books. She is one of Canada's most respected writers, still at the top of her form in a career that stretches back to the 1940s, and during which she has gained three honorary degrees and two Governor General's Awards for Poetry (for Winter Sun and No Time).