SOURCE: "Curious Encounter," in Canadian Literature, No. 134, Autumn, 1992, pp. 105-07.

In the following review of Selected Poems, Bowering remarks on Avison's place in Canadian literature and the subjects of her poetry.

Margaret Avison's poems were anthologized in A. J. M. Smith's The Book of Canadian Poetry in 1943. It was not until 1960, when she was forty-two, that her first book was published. Six years later her second book (reprinting many poems from the first) came out—in the United States. In the following years publishers large or literary petitioned for a manuscript to no avail until 1978, when an unknown publisher in rural Nova Scotia produced an amateurish-looking collection. In 1989 that same publisher presented a much better collection, No Time, which, like Avison's first book, earned the Governor-General's award for poetry.

Four books in fifty years.

But it has become a cliché in Canadian literary matters that Margaret Avison is...