Margaret Avison

Margaret Avison Poems

Margaret Avison Biography

Margaret Avison (April 23, 1918 – July 31, 2007) was a Canadian poet who twice won Canada's Governor General's Award and has also won its Griffin Poetry Prize. "Her work has often been praised for the beauty of its language and images." Avison was born in Galt, Ontario, and grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, and Calgary, Alberta, the daughter of a Methodist minister. She attended Alma College, located in St. Thomas, Ontario, ca. 1935. As a teenager she was hospitalized for anorexia. She attended Victoria University in the University of Toronto, getting her B.A. in 1940 (and returning to pick up her M.A. in 1965). She began publishing poetry in the college magazine, Acta Victoriana. "Despite the fact that Avison dedicated her life to poetry, she 'never wanted to "be a poet."'" She "worked as a librarian, social worker, and teacher, writing her poetry in the evenings." "Until her retirement at 68, she was a 'wage-earner,' never applying for a Canada Council grant and quitting several jobs whenever they threatened to evolve into a time-sucking 'career.'" She "has taught at Scarborough College, and did social work at the Presbyterian Church Mission in Toronto." She "also wrote a textbook, History of Ontario, for junior high school students, published in 1951." "In addition to her own poetry, Avison translated poems and short stories from Hungarian to English." Avison's poem "Gatineau" appeared in Canadian Poetry Magazine in 1939. In 1943, anthologist A.J.M. Smith included her poetry in his Book of Canadian Poetry. (In her autobiography, she mentions a "chaste skinny dip" with Smith.) In 1956 Avison received a Guggenheim Fellowship, "which she used to travel to Chicago. There she completed her first poetry anthology, Winter Sun." between 1956 and 1957. It was not until three years later that her first book of poems, Winter Sun, was published. Winter Sun won the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1960. Avison converted to Christianity (from agnosticism) in 1963. She wrote about that experience in her second book of poetry, The Dumbfounding (1966). Her friend, English professor Joseph Zezulka, said of her Christian faith: "It was a private religious conviction, adding: "She was kindliness itself. She had so much tolerance and charity for her fellow beings, and I think that's the important thing about her Christianity." Avison was writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario in 1972-73. From 1973 to 1978 she worked in the archives division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). In 1978 she joined Toronto's Mustard Seed Mission, and worked there until her retirement in 1986. Avison became an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1984. Her fourth collection of poems, No Time, came out in 1990, and won her a second Governor General's Award. In 2003 Avison's Concrete and Wild Carrot won the Griffin Poetry Prize. "Lauding Avison as 'a national treasure,' Griffin Poetry Prize judges praised the 'sublimity' and 'humility' of her poetry -- which they described as 'some of the most humane, sweet and profound poetry of our time.'" Margaret Avison died in Toronto on July 31, 2007, age 89, from undisclosed causes.)

The Best Poem Of Margaret Avison

New Year's Poem

The Christmas twigs crispen and needles rattle
Along the window-ledge.
A solitary pearl
Shed from the necklace spilled at last week's party
Lies in the suety, snow-luminous plainness
Of morning, on the window-ledge beside them.
And all the furniture that circled stately
And hospitable when these rooms were brimmed
With perfumes, furs, and black-and-silver
Crisscross of seasonal conversation, lapses
Into its previous largeness.
I remember
Anne's rose-sweet gravity, and the stiff grave
Where cold so little can contain;
I mark the queer delightful skull and crossbones
Starlings and sparrows left, taking the crust,
And the long loop of winter wind
Smoothing its arc from dark Arcturus down
To the bricked corner of the drifted courtyard,
And the still window-ledge.
Gentle and just pleasure
It is, being human, to have won from space
This unchill, habitable interior
Which mirrors quietly the light
Of the snow, and the new year.

Margaret Avison Comments