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

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).

One of Canada's most respected poets, Margaret Avison was born in Galt, Ontario, lived in Western Canada in her childhood, and then in Toronto. In a productive career that stretched back to the 1940s, she produced seven books of poems, including her first collection, Winter Sun (1960), which she assembled in Chicago while she was there on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and which won the Governor General's Award. No Time (Lancelot Press), a work that focussed on her interest in spiritual discovery and moral and religious values, also won the Governor General's Award for 1990. Avison's published poetry up to 2002 was gathered into Always Now: the Collected Poems (Porcupine's Quill, 2003), including Concrete and Wild Carrot which won the 2003 Griffin Prize. Her most recent book, Listening, Last Poems, was published in 2009 by McClelland & Stewart.

Margaret Avison was the recipient of many awards including the Order of Canada and three honorary doctorates.

Margaret Avison's profile page

" ... Amounts to a beautiful argument for Ongoingness, and open-heartedness ... these poems have won us outright by virtue of their unflagging precision, notional complexity and exuberance ... If lyric poetry has a country, welcome to its capital."--Ken Babstock, The Globe and Mail

"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