To the River is a beautifully crafted gathering of poems. Turning and returning to the banks of the South Saskatchewan River, it is a compelling meditation conducted in the presence of a particular landscape. With great metaphorical muscle, the poems move towards the inhabitants of that riverscape, which remains rich with a sense of the strangeness inside the familiarity of willow, geese, river ice, coyote, snowberry. It is not just the satisfaction of aesthetic accomplishment which gives the book its compulsive energy, but the persistence of the seeker’s desire for what eludes even our strongest acts of language. Contemplative and spare, spiritual and sensual, To the River is a poetry of praise, a love poem to the earth, a prayer, and a journal of interior practice. It is a collection written by a poet moving into the full stretch of his power.

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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“Lilburn’s contemplative language has a resonant beauty.”
–Montreal Gazette
“A poet of standing comes into his own.”
–Dennis Lee