To the River

by Tim Lilburn

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.

Genres: Poetry, Canada

88 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 1999

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.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two weeks of thirty-five below and the fat sway of the river

is jammed four feet down,

but on the creek between hills, behind

beaver dams, ice slumps under snowshoes and

there are no deer tracks.
Fire thrums and lounges godly in the stove.
Big lynx prints behind the hut; heavy
thatch of the Milky Way;
coyotes; the red of the willows
is poor.
Deer coats are poplar ash.

Green ice of the river where a

hoof has scratched snow crust.

*

Under the wedge of light,
you know nothing.
You'll sing the inside of the snowberry.
A cold with scales heaves up the valley;

the dark flower of the cold ignites the dark

flower in the hump of fat things carry.

There is waiting.
You will lay you cheek against the float of the grass.
There is winter in her body;

there are grains of winter in her body and a low sun.

There is the colour of horror over the snow.

*

I went under the

earth and the river

gave me a rag, a leg bone to hold.
We looked into one another's
face. Don't say I'm here.
I am feverish with grass.
A dark in things, in wild rose,

a stalk, a line coming out of the mouth and

curving, is weight, privacy, sleep,

a cache of fat

the seeable thing sucks on, turns to, and

lives with.

The bull of the weather moves from here to there,
the purple and the bulge
in the heft of moving, unfallen snow.
The complete moon is still there
when I carry a poplar trunk out of the bush
to cut it by the road.
An inhaled wind moves in things; quiet

flickers there, receiving a spread of weight.

The dark tower and at its top

an almost buried light in cold trees.

*

The river is a man who's just ducked into a doorway,

who's changed his name and lives in the crawlspace.

The river has worn through itself and is turning up its hands.
A man and a dog come across it late in the afternoon

at a stump-bank near Bohemian waxwings in a cottonwood in

crouched sun.

Ice plinks and wangs, some thinking

going on in a room in the castle of the river-ice's private ear,

whale-moan, other-side moan of the ice.
Under the ice, the long hair of what is not there.
Low in the dogwood's throat,

under dead leaves, the river has its name tied up in some cloth.

The river is widowed.
The rabbit island willows and Periphyseon

and The Divine Names are the same thing.

Seeing the willows, their forehead light, you walk into the thicket

of the book and are poor.

Willow showing red, mild week in January,

a red that drops its eyes

when you look at it.

*

Late light, grass-thin and a bone star,

shimmy of fox tracks beside the black stumble

of water, along the river's snow-ice ledge.

The willow has gone into the small room of its redness
where there is no book; the new cold

lowers a perfect rope to climb into ash.

Way into the burly water, you could hear something.
The woman has looked a pelican descent into me,

her weight and her slope,

her weight and slope into me.
You go into the bush and the bush shrugs.
The woman has tipped into me the far corner
of her eye; I'll build a fire where I am and wait.

- Slow World, pg. 4-8

* * *

The river sits in the blood chair.
The dolphin plain stumbles out a breathing,

barely given-off light,

the intelligence of a block of salt.
The river sits in the blood chair,

its desire lifting and coming back down to it in its own early-

December smoke.

Dull stub of receiving light on the plain going toward crumpled

snow hills then toward the red-gold mountains.

The river is the unlit fat.
Neither ascending nor descending, it doesn't care.
It is the flat part of looking where the breath is even.
A large cooling animal.
The river sits in the blood chair,

its desire lifting and coming back down in its winter smoke.

An animal standing out there,

cooling from the distances, smoke of all

that it has done coming

from it, dead-green around it.

- Dark Song, pg. 41

[Debbie Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Call it a song, a tribute, a prayer, a meditation…Tim Lilburn’s To the River is a hypnotic collection of 14 long and water-flowing poems set along the banks of the South Saskatchewan River. Unlike many ‘natured-themed’ work, Lilburn’s words nudge the reader to lie down, to look closer at the scenery from a different perspective, to reflect on the unique metaphorical images, and to feel the rhythm of the river, the movement of dark and light.

For example, in his poem “Music In The Cloud”, he uses the word “Huaizhao” (p. 39) which means to cherish and gather light. “I am what the darkness likes.” (p. 40)

In the long poem “Marriage and Agriculture”, he pens “The river blows a black, hoof-bright horn./It wears a cap of dead owls.” (p. 73)

I especially enjoyed the poet’s description of colour: “a hawk-coloured path.” (p. 18), “the sparrow-coloured woman” (p. 19), “The crane-coloured paths” (p. 19), “A bruise of sky” (p. 54), “wolf-coloured” (p. 71), and “Sun the colour of gravel,” (p. 72).

His work is filled with birds and insects such as sparrows, cranes, geese, and moths; animals such as coyotes, deer, and wolves; trees such as cottonwoods, spruce, and elms; and vegetation such as grass, wheat, and potatoes.

My favourite lines: “The river is a man who’s just ducked into a doorway,/who’s changed his name and lives in the crawlspace” (p. 7), “The sun now rots at the edge of the world.” (p. 66), and “Night leans its shoulder into your lung.” (p. 59)

A stunning book to be read more than once to uncover the multifaceted characteristics of the river: “a ledge of faces running just under it.” (p. 36) “It is immortal and long-haired, its fingernails grow.” (p. 71)

[Stephen Novik · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book of Canadian outdoor nature poems made me realize just how much I love cities! Rivers, mountains, plains, clouds, animals, flowers,... Please give me poems about skylines and buildings and roads, crumbling infrastructure, stores, schools, churches, parks, cars, trucks, buses, bikes, etc! Don't get me wrong, the poems in this book are quite clever, but to this city soul not all that compelling!

[Claudia Savage · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for innovative nature poetry. At times, quiet and contemplative. At others, brutal and charged. Just the way the natural world should be portrayed. Lilburn makes the river into a landscape of a well-loved body. And, he's from Saskatchewan. How many poets are from Saskatchewan?