Concrete and Wild Carrot

By Margaret Avison

WINNER OF THE 2003 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE

In Margaret Avison's new poems, little pleasures are bound up with larger ones.

Her slightest subjects--beloved Toronto parks with their population of oaks, firs, squirrels, dogs, kids, even ants, and the minutest sighs of her contemporary urban soundscape--all have their being within an immense composition that calls and hauls us to a largeness, a category-breaking "always unthinkable" beyond.

"Words have their life too, won't/ compact into a theorem," Avison says, and this is certainly true of hers.

"To myself everywhere:
Cry out, "Break " Break
all our securities, and break out
Explore only the ranges
beyond our mastering. Take on
the inexorable demands made by
a norm of unpremeditated excellence "

--from "Alternatives to Riots but all Citizens Must Play"

Concrete and Wild Carrot is Margaret Avison's sixth book of poems, her first with Brick Books--though we now distribute her Lancelot Press books. She is one of Canada's most respected writers, still at the top of her form in a career that stretches back to the 1940s, and during which she has gained three honorary degrees and two Governor General's Awards for Poetry (for Winter Sun and No Time).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1894078241
• ISBN13: 9781894078245
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Length: 74 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.7" x 8.7"