SOURCE: "Prayers and Sermons," in Books in Canada, Vol. 12, No. 3, March, 1983, pp. 19-20.

Garebian is a Canadian educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he favorably reviews Winter Sun/The Dumbfounding: Poems 1940–1966.

Margaret Avison can be so coolly cerebral, so subtly technical in her verse that she might well seem to be purely for the library. However, her poetry's difficulty is brightened by witty particulars that show her to be (like Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wallace Stevens) a metaphysician in love with this world or, at least, those parts of it that she can order into an understanding of being. There are no terrifying northern landscapes in her poems, no mere geophysical horrors or primitive travails of the land. Those who seek native emblems—maple leaves, beavers, bears, or bush gardens—are bound to be disappointed or perplexed. At most, they will find myrrh in "gardenless gardens," the...