Avison, Margaret

▪ Canadian poet

born April 23, 1918, Galt, Ont., Can.

died July 31, 2007, Toronto, Ont.

      Canadian poet who revealed the progress of an interior spiritual journey in her three successive volumes of poetry. Her work has often been praised for the beauty of its language and images.

      The daughter of a Methodist minister, Avison attended the University of Toronto (B.A., 1940; M.A., 1964) and worked as a librarian, editor, lecturer, and social worker at church missions in Toronto. Her poems appeared in magazines as early as 1939. She began writing the poems of Winter Sun (1960), her first collection, in 1956, while living in Chicago as a Guggenheim fellow. The introspective poems of this collection are concerned with belief and moral knowledge, and for the most part they are written in free verse. About the same time she was writing these poems, Avison was deeply moved by the unsuccessful uprising of Hungarians against their communist government. She subsequently helped translate several Hungarian poems and stories into English for two anthologies of Hungarian literature.

      In the early 1960s Avison experienced a religious awakening that confirmed her Christian beliefs, an experience she recounted in the title poem of her second collection, The Dumbfounding (1966). Less introspective and more direct, these poems recall 17th-century Metaphysical poetry, as they present images of spiritual vitality in everyday life. Many of her poems in Sunblue (1978) are based on biblical stories; the poems further investigate her Christian beliefs, and she takes nature as a metaphor for spiritual realities. In 1991 Selected Poems was published. Her later poetry collections include No Time (1989), Not Yet but Still (1997), and Concrete and Wild Carrot (2002).

Additional Reading

David A. Kent (ed.), Lighting Up the Terrain: The Poetry of Margaret Avison (1987); David A. Kent, Margaret Avison and Her Works (1989).

* * *