The Names Poems

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.

TIM LILBURN is the author of nine previous books of poetry, including Assiniboia, Orphic Politics, Kill-site, and To the River. His work has received the Governor General’s Award and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, among other prizes. Lilburn is also the author of two essay collections, Living in the World As If It Were Home and Going Home, and the editor of two other influential books on poetics. He teaches at the University of Victoria.