Tim Lilburn - Tim Lilburn & The Environment

Tim Lilburn & The Environment

Moosewood Sandhills - One of Lilburn's earlier works, Moosewood Sandhills is a collection of poetry that intuits a strong sense of locality that is both metaphysical and physical. With due reference to his prairie birthplace, Saskatchewan, Lilburn struggles to find a connection with the desolate world that surrounds him. In an interview with Peter Gzowski on Morningside, Lilburn reveals that he found the sandhills "initially repellent, and too sparse, and yielding," but that the place "completely claimed my imagination, claimed my vision, claimed my love". Lilburn's poetry in Moosewood Sandhills seemingly becomes intertwined with Robert Frost's iconic image of the deer amongst nature, but Lilburn separates himself from Frost's work by taking observance from a different perspective. In Lilburn's poems, lying down seems to encourage kinds of patience and contact unlike those found through that favourite, more familiar activity of nature poets, walking.

To The River - Written at the midpoint of Lilburn's career, To The River follows Lilburn as he returns to the banks of the South Saskatchewan River. Following thematically from Moosewood Sandhills, Lilburn describes his various stages of contemplation in the presence of a particular landscape. Lilburn's writing discusses the strangeness of the inhabitants of the riverscape and contrasts it with his acute familiarity with his local surroundings: willow, geese, river ice, coyote and snowberry.

Going Home - Lilburn continues to explore his previous preoccupations from Living in the World as if Were Home, a book dealing primarily with both ecology and desire. Here Lilburn returns once again to Saskatchewan: "I realized that at forty, although I had been probed by many psychologists, spent eight years in Jesuit formation, read many books, I had done nothing to educate myself to be someone who could live with facility, familiarity, where he was born." He goes on to philosophize about this experience: "We need to find our way to take the place in our mouth; we must re-say our past in such a way that it will gather us here." Lilburn's explorations of his surroundings has clearly helped him to learn to be at home with his world.