Written over a nine-year span, Living In The World As If It Were Home is a careful, exquisite look at the human desire to share a home with long grass, rivers, and stones, by poet Tim Lilburn. Lilburn's collection of essays plots the work required to roughly re-establish the conditions of Paradise; it explores the world of prairies rivers, aspen-covered sandhills, deer country, big lakes taking on their first ice in late October, the moon rising over chokecherry thickets, and asks: How to be here?

There's nothing glib about the answer Lilburn offers — as he says in one of his poems: "The way back will be hard, ghost road through the rooms of sorrow/moon of contemplation on our backs." Though hard, however, the way is readily available: plain delight, he believes, knows the way. But the project to live in the world as though it were home requires the recovery of the full resources of human desire. The muscle of eros needs to be made strong. To do this, Lilburn turns to those almost forgotten masters of desire, the mystics of the negative way, psuedo-Dionysius, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing and John Scotus Eriugena.

This is a remarkable collection, a "classic" as Dennis Lee says in his foreword, by a writer with passion and insight, in hopeless love with the unsayable world, the place which "ignites awe" yet is completely vulnerable to human ingenu

Tim Lilburn has published several volumes of poetry and is the author of Living in the World As If it Were Home, winner of the Saskatchewan Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award and finalist for the Saskatoon Book Award. He teaches philosophy and literature at St. Peter's College in Muenster, Saskatchewan, and lives in Saskatoon, near the South Saskatchewan River.  

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