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...