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Articles

Volume 20, Number 1 (1995)

The Grass is Epic: Tim Lilburn's Moosewood Sandhills

  • Brian Bartlett
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1995-01-01

Abstract

Poet Brian Bartlett's paean of praise captures his experience of "living with" Tim Lilburn's poems from Moosewood Sandhills, an exploration of three years of life in the sandhills along the South Saskatchewan River. Contrasting the difference between reading as "looking at something and living with it" (from Joseph Wood Krutch's The Desert Year), Bartlett opts for a multi-layered approach to the poems, drawing parallels with Thoreau's Walden, Roethke's "North American Sequence," and Wallace Stevens's The Palm At the End of the Mind, and giving close readings to lines. He celebrates Lilburn's combination of religious asceticism with intense visual imagery of natural phenomena, and his dichotomies of abstract and sensuous language, all of which create an unusual, demanding book.