Margaret Avison Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Margaret Calverley

SOURCE: "'Service Is Joy': Margaret Avison's Sonnet Sequence in Winter Sun," in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 50, Fall, 1993, pp. 210-30.

In the essay below, Calverley argues that "Snow," "Tennis," "Unbroken Lineage," and "Butterfly Bones" form a sonnet sequence and that Avison's purpose is a celebration of "the liberating force of traditional patterns."

Much critical debate has been generated by Margaret Avison's "Snow." "Butterfly Bones: Or, Sonnet against Sonnets," as well, has received close attention. No one has examined, however, the possibility that these poems together with "Tennis" and "Unbroken Lineage," the four sonnets in Winter Sun, form a sequence. More specifically, they are a cycle, an "Unbroken Lineage." Critics who comment on the last of the four, "Sonnet against Sonnets," lean toward David Kent's view [in Margaret Avison and Her Works, 1989] that it is a "farewell to the sonnet form," or Francis Zichy's claim that it ends...
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