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SOURCE: "The Mind's Eyes [I's] [Ice]: The Poetry of Margaret Avison," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 16, No. 3, July, 1970, pp. 185-202.
New is a Canadian educator, critic, and poet. In the essay below, he discusses theme and style in Avison's poetry, focusing on ambiguity, identity, sense, and perception.
Even with all the intelligence that hindsight allows, it is hard to see in Margaret Avison's earliest poems the poet she was later to become. "Gatineau," published in December 1939, reads this way:
There is a rock at the river-edge
Girt by the chain of a boom;
The yellow wind trickles among the sedge
And the air is raw with gloom.
The long black river is uncoiled
Among the stolid hills,
And day is like a window curtain, soiled
Against night's windowsills.
The desolation like a churl
Knows only, empty-eyed
The bleak unconscience of a world
Intent on suicide.
It appears girt...
This section contains 6,611 words (approx. 23 pages at 300 words per page) |
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