Winner of the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize and of the 2003 CAA Jack Chalmers Poetry Award and Globe 100 book for 2003

“…Margaret Avison is a national treasure. For many decades she has forged a way to write, against the grain, some of the most humane, sweet and profound poetry of our time.” – from the Griffin Poetry Prize Judges’ Citation

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).