From Governor General's Award-winning poet Tim Lilburn comes a new collection of poetry of great scope and ambition.

The Names is personal and familial archaeology, an extemporal dig giving spectres back to their bodies. With its lines sped up and dazzlingly associative, Tim Lilburn’s cocktail of obsessions – confession, ontology, mystical theology, humour and extreme, fleet, apt weirdness – marches through on full display. He pulls in an even broader cast of characters than his previous collections managed: John Ruusbroec and Marguerite Porete brush past aunts, uncles, and unusual creatures steering the boats of language past fog-draped trees. In Lilburn’s latest collection, we are immersed in a realism of remarkable proportions, as though incandescent memory comprised both texture and text, and combined formed the elemental fibres of a perilous present.

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

• "[Lilburn’s work] is astounding in its use of language. Image layered on image – and the force of that layering – creates, in the reader, a fusion of excitement and alienation that can be transformative." --The Antigonish Review
• "For decades, poet Tim Lilburn has sung songs of praise and moans of loss for the natural world, while grappling with the ultimate failure of words to render the divinity of the natural order. . . . [Lilburn has] thrilled readers with the jagged aggression that spikes his ecstatic visions. . . . His turns of phrase can be breathtaking." --Globe and Mail

• "Lilburn stands in awe of, and has come as close as humanly possible to capturing, the magnitude and magnificence of creation." --Arc Poetry Magazine
• "Striking and original. . . . [Lilburn captures] the mystical and ecstatic moments when self and world are united." --Booklist