Louis Riel prophesied that a polyglot Métis nation would rise on the prairies five hundred years after his death, and that it would be called the House of Charlemagne. Tim Lilburn tracks the birth of this ideal nation in the burning imagination of the young settler William Henry Jackson, who took the name Honoré Jaxon after his encounter with Riel’s thought. Created as a text for dancers, the poem gives voice and body to a visionary metaphysics.

“The brilliant collaborations at the heart of this book testify to the persistence of loyalty, belief, poetry, community, and the land itself. The colonial agenda of erasure is refuted by the music of shared creation. Even when the text is lost, the dance continues.”—Warren Cariou, author of Lake of the Prairies

“The fevered beauty of The House of Charlemagne’s exquisite forms plunges us into a prophetic vision which circles our past to thread it through our future.”— The Rt. Hon. Adrienne Clarkson, 26th Governor General of Canada

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.

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