SOURCE: "Search and Discovery: Margaret Avison's Poetry," Canadian Literature, No. 60, Spring, 1974, pp. 7-20.

In the following essay, Doerksen focuses on religious and spiritual themes in Avison's work, which he describes as a poetry of "spiritual quest and discovery."

In "Love (III)", the poem which concludes his "picture of many spiritual Conflicts", George Herbert portrays the culmination of the religious quest in unexpected discovery. Unaware that she herself will one day describe such experience, the Margaret Avison of Winter Sun feels intrigued into envious comment. Having probed about in a world of Heraclitean flux and materialistic preoccupation, she marvels that

      George Herbert—and he makes it plain—
      Guest at this same transfiguring board
         Did sit and eat.

And indeed Miss Avison's own poetical achievement in Winter Sun (1960) and The Dumbfounding (1966) merits consideration as spiritual quest and discovery. The first of her books is marked by a continual seeking, while...