SOURCE: "A Reconsideration of Margaret Avison's 'Dispersed Titles'," in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 47, Fall, 1992, pp. 163-80.

In the following essay, Calverly provides a detailed reading of "Dispersed Titles."

Margaret Avison likes to challenge her audience with riddling ambiguities. After an initial reading, one might close her first—and most difficult—volume, Winter Sun, with a sigh, and wonder if she could perhaps have been a little less covert. But one of the key lines in the opening poem, "The Apex Animal," does make a clear and direct appeal to the reader's imagination. The poet, searching for some ultimate being, speaks of the enigmatic "Head of the Horse," and continues: "It, I fancy, and from experience / commend the fancy to your inner eye." Her readers are continually encouraged to look within themselves: they are asked to enter the turbulence of the "whirlpool" of the mind in "The Swimmer's...