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 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.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 29, 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.

Reviews

[Kyeren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a quick review for the curious reader, not a crafted poetry treatise. Let me begin by saying that Tim Lilburn is a poet's poet, not a "gateway" poet (he's not what you give your granny for Christmas, unless she's a poet or a serious reader of poetry). Few are equipped to understand every Lilburn-y turn of phrase--he's a phenomenal mind. You've got to allow yourself to sink into the music and the rolling rhythm of the lines--try breathing open to it all and let it carry you, because it will. His work is an experience, and if you're lucky it'll crack you open.

The Names is probably my favorite Lilburn collection thus far. His characters are drawn from the grittiness of the earth, yet he lifts them into the mythical, into legend. Place is everything in a Lilburn work, and my favourite spot here is the creek--"a black ledger/where our/names fell as sediment." I love how it transforms the kids, how their otherness stirs and swells inside it's waters. Every poem is a journey; you can't predict where it'll take you--from peril to tranquility, from outlaws to the sacred. It's miraculous stuff.

This is one of five books I lugged around with me during the final months of editing my own collection--when I trekked off to the coffee shop, I couldn't leave it behind. And it's still on my reading pile. I can't bring myself to shelf it, I love it so. Favourite poem in the collection: "Rosemont." It's deeply confessional, and it nudges me open, open, open... every time.

[Scott Wall · Rating 2 out of 5]

The rating isn't meant as a slight to Lilburn's broader work, and in fact...I'll readily admit that my appreciation for his imagination and thoughtfulness lie behind my ho-hum response to this volume.

I found his description of topography and the natural world enthralling at times -- and his callbacks to prairie life and locations stirred memories of my own. I just don't read as broadly nor as deeply as Tim, apparently...and found I couldn't always find the passwords I felt I needed to move on with his imagery and language. Oh well.

[Lynn Filliter · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly I think the majority of the poems were just beyond me because of the number of allusions he works into his poems. I enjoyed "End of August" but in general, though I could appreciate the artistry, I did not enjoy the collection or most of the poems.

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

This wasn't the collection for me. Whilst I could somewhat appreciate the skill that forged these poems, I couldn't connect to or even understand some of them. Not a bad collection, just not for me.

[Brian Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved “The Northern City”.