In her book Winter Sun, Margaret Avison fears the mathematical certainty of the new science, which from the seventeenth century on has appeared to remove the ground of faith from the believing Christian and has clamped the world in other vices. This kind of false human clarity can affect all human relationships; she fears the over-familiarity of "all the eyes I do not own" and she also fears the vortex of love, the suction toward a compulsion that will leave all those "eyes I do not own" orbiting round the edges. She fears depersoned existence. She prefers destiny to gravitation, yet both are predetermined. A Calvinist she is not, nor a modern-day behaviourist. Yet, as the narrator of these poems heals herself of her misapprehension of love, so the poet heals herself of a misapprehension of science -- at least in part. Along with the physicists who have the courage to occupy the same air with poets, she works out an understanding of her Christ's domus on the new map of the universe, resting assured that no amount of intelligence can altogether predetermine the post-Newtonian world.
