SOURCE: "'Each in His Prison I Thinking of the Key': Images of Confinement and Liberation in Margaret Avison," in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer, 1978, pp. 232-43.

In the following essay, Zichy examines style and imagery in several of Avison's poems, focusing on the relationship between confinement and liberation.

My immediate subject is a group of poems by Margaret Avison in which images of confinement and liberation are insistently present, and present in a special relation. In these poems confinement and liberation are related dialectically: a sense of confinement makes an effort at liberation essential: efforts at liberation enforce yet another confinement. The poet-protagonist feels compelled to strive to liberate herself from a conventional perspective ("The optic heart must venture: a jail-break / And recreation"—"Snow"), but this act of liberation imposes yet another perspective that must again be broken out of. The perspective imposed by the protagonist's...