With Numinous Seditions, celebrated poet and essayist Tim Lilburn investigates inner dispositions that might help us bear the new sorrows of the climate crisis. The book draws from the West’s almost forgotten contemplative tradition in its Platonic, Islamic, Christian, and Zoharic forms. It also explores ideas from modern philosophers Jan Zwicky, Gillian Rose, Dorothy Day, and Simone Weil, and from contemporary poets Don Domanski, Philip Kevin Paul, Anne Szumigalski, and Roberto Harrison. Lilburn suggests that listening, noticing, reading, and stretching our imaginations are all part of an interior stance that can assist with the difficult tasks of forming deep relationships with the land, with Indigenous peoples, and with pedagogy itself. Numinous Seditions is for scholars and readers interested in poetry, environmental philosophy, and in the possibility of a contemplative politics.

Tim Lilburn was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. He has published eight books of poetry, including To the River, Kill-site, and Orphic Politics. His work has received the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry for Kill-site and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award (for To the River), among other prizes. Lilburn has produced two essay collections, both concerned with poetics, eros, and politics, Living in the World as if It Were Home and Going Home, and edited two other collections on poetics, Poetry and Knowing and Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy. He was a participant in the 2008 Pamirs Poetry Journey. Lilburn teaches at the University of Victoria.

Tim Lilburn's profile page

• Short-listed, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize

"Numinous Seditions proposes to expand the human imagination with a call to renewed vision. It invites the reader into active, thoughtful engagement with arguably the most crucial question of our time: what can I make of myself, in the world we have made for ourselves?" H. L. Hix, University of Wyoming

"Among the book’s ample gifts are its refusal of confected hope and its hosting of a larger conversation. Here Ibn ‘Arabī brushes foreheads with Anne Szumigalski, Andrew Ahenakew’s polar bear shares the sky with the angel of pseudo-Dionysius. In contemplating shards of ancient wisdom, Lilburn seeks the grace needed to grieve the conflagration of the world." Warren Heiti, author of Attending: An Ethical Art

“The lucent essays gathered in Tim Liburn’s new book offer what they adumbrate: a ‘refugium for attentiveness,’ opening lines of earthbound thought, enriching our lexicon, and retrieving forgotten practices in order to cultivate a contemplative, compassionate, and creative modus vivendi in the midst of the unspeakable sorrow of ecological unravelling, climatic disruption, and the continuing legacies of imperialist violence. Amongst them is a meditation on lectio divina that might be taken as a guide for reading these essays themselves, many of them tending towards the fragmentary, punctuated with pauses, and all of them replete with invitations to see, feel, and imagine otherwise.” Kate Rigby, author of Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction