The Names: Poems

by Tim Lilburn

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.

80 pages, Paperback

Published March 22, 2016

About the author

Tim Lilburn is the author of six books of poetry, including the Governor Generals Award-winning collection Kill-Site. He is also the author of a book of essays, Living in the World as if It Were Home, and the editor of two anthologies, Thinking and Singing and Poetry and Knowing.