Assiniboia

by Tim Lilburn

From Governor General's Award-winning poet Tim Lilburn comes a new collection of poetry of great scope and ambition.
 
Assiniboia is a richly textured imagining of a Western Canada that could have been. Theatrical, operatic -- a masque and a pair of choral performances -- the book breaks new formal ground in Canadian poetry. The huge spectacle of Tim Lilburn's eighth collection gives us a new land peopled by figures from the visionary governments of Louis Riel and from the western mysticism, as well as land forms with the power of speech, all acting together as a kind of ghostly army bent on overturning more than a century of colonial practice.

Genres: Poetry, Canada

104 pages, Paperback

First published March 20, 2012

About the author

Tim Lilburn is the author of six books of poetry, including the Governor Generals Award-winning collection Kill-Site. He is also the author of a book of essays, Living in the World as if It Were Home, and the editor of two anthologies, Thinking and Singing and Poetry and Knowing.

Reviews

[Andrea Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deeply poetic and imaginative mind is creating a story of a fictional land that really was a land. This collection of poems is a re imagining from an amazing poet and teacher. The setting is Canada, Western Canada as it might have been. Powerful imagery and strong narrative are the driving force behind this most astonishing work by Tim Lilburn.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Lilburn’s apparent program in Assiniboia, a poetic closet drama displaying an in-progress syncretism of a very few aboriginal and a great many European mythical artifacts with elements of nature and geography partially mediated by an accommodating Catholicism, while challenging, is not in itself an impossibility. Whether Lilburn succeeds is another question.. . .

Read the rest of "Tim Lilburn's 'Assiniboia' and the Discomfort it Makes Me Feel" at: http://behindthehedge.wordpress.com/2...