SOURCE: "Margaret Avison and the Place of Meaning," in "Lighting up the Terrain": The Poetry of Margaret Avison, edited by David Kent, ECW Press, 1987, pp. 7-26.

In the following essay, Kertzer examines language and meaning in Avison's poetry.

Surveying the literary scene in 1959, Margaret Avison wrote: "Any Canadian writer, for example, is aware of a scuffle to find his own words, his own idiom…. In trying to find his language-level, then, a Canadian poet is trying to assert both an identity and an aesthetic" ["Poets in Canada," Poetry (June 1959)]. It is tempting to apply these remarks to her own work: to praise a gradual refinement of style that permits her to assert a distinctive poetic personality in a native idiom. In this view, the early poetry of alienation relieved by imaginative insight (the "optic heart" in Winter Sun) would yield first to religious doubt (the "blindfold" poems in...