To his virtuoso collection of new poems, Tim Lilburn brings a philosopher’s mind and the eyes and ears of a marsh hawk. This series of earthy meditations makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Lilburn’s close study of goldenrod, an ice sheet, or night opens into surprising interior and subterranean worlds. Pythagoras lurks within the poplars, Socrates in stones, people fly below the ground. Elsewhere, the human presence of motels and beer parlours is ominous. Kill-site is an exploration of a human’s animal nature. Lilburn invites the reader to: “Go below the small things… then / walk inside them and you have their kindness.” Though a natural progression from Lilburn’s last book, To the River, in Kill-site, the poet moves toward a greater understanding of the human, of sacrifice.
Author
Tim Lilburn
TIM LILBURN lives in the Bowker Creek watershed in W̱SÁNEĆ territory on Vancouver Island. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Harmonia Mundi, The House of Charlemagne, and The Names. His poetry has received the Governor General’s Award, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the European Medal of Poetry and Art (the Homer Medal), the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award and the Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence, among other prizes. His poetry has been translated widely. Lilburn is also the author of three earlier essay collections, Living In The World As If It Were Home, Going Home, and The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place, and editor of two other influential books on poetics. A fourth essay collection, Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change, appeared from the University of Alberta Press in 2023. He has taught at the University of Victoria, the University of Saskatchewan, St. Peter’s College and Middlebury College, and worked with the dance company New Dance Horizons/Rouge-gorge as a writer and performer, collaborating with co-directors Edward Poitras and Robin Poitras.
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