"Avison's new volume is a lyrical tribute to a created order suffused with a holy energy--a vitality inaccessible to the statisticians, the engineers, the corporate mandarins. It is not, however, a whimsical, Pollyanish ecstacy that sustains her, but a gritty religious vision grounded in our desperate humanity, the 'roped-in, rotten,/ welted and swollen, sick,/ tempter-take-all/ maggot- ripe end of our fall' ('He himself suffered when he was tempted'), but redeemed, generously redeemed." (Michael Higgins)

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.

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