Looking to the Sunblue

On Saturday, I meet poet Tim Lilburn for coffee when he is in Winnipeg so we can talk about Margaret. When I interviewed Margaret in 2001, I went to the archive and discovered that all of the correspondence she had received from other writers was in her papers. Among them were letters from a young poet from Saskatchewan named Tim Lilburn.

Tim tells me that he began writing to Margaret after he had read sunblue. Sunblue was published in 1978, and came after a long hiatus of 12 years (The Dumbfounding came out in 1966). The book fell into Tim’s hands around the time he was about to enter the priesthood. Sunblue made a strong impression on him. It was a kind of poetry that he’d not really encountered thus far in Canada – and was unlike the verse his peers were writing in the prairies at the time. "What I admired about Margaret’s poems was their ambition," Tim said. There was a certain scale, a robustness, in the writing and language that strongly appealed to Tim that was reminiscent of Hopkins, and while I found Margaret’s poems to be surprisingly selfless in that they were not pre-occupied with confession or lyric identity-seeking, Tim found the self in the language to be interesting – engaging and acutely perceptive. It was this ‘self’ that made Tim want to meet Margaret.

He got his chance later when he moved to Toronto during his priest’s training. The Margaret he met was busy with everyday cares; in particular, she was tending her ailing mother while holding down a full time job at a mission’s office. Tim witnessed a genuinely and abidingly compassionate woman, humane and moral, but also intensely private. I long held the suspicion that this might have made Margaret a lonely woman, but loneliness is a state of being poets know well.

Looking at the poems of sunblue now, they strike me as being more firmly grounded in faith. Many of the poems are meditations on scripture: “Embezzler (Luke 16)”, “Dryness and Scorch of Ahab’s evil rule”, “He Couldn’t be Safe (Isaiah 53:5)”, “As a Comment on Romans 1:10", “The Circuit (Phil. 2:5-11)”. In “The Bible to Be Believed,” we see the pre-eminence of the poet’s belief of Christ as the Living Word – the Christ who as he reads the scriptures transforms it and eventually ‘seals’ it. Reading these poems, I feel like I’m doing lectio divina with Margaret. In lectio, one dwells on a passage of scripture, embeds oneself in it, and is thus transformed by it. In “The Bible to Be Believed,” the poet points out the reverse – that Christ in reading the word thus transformed it. Indeed, and since His appearance in the world (and in the word,) we read the world and the scriptures before it, differently. That is the Bible, the poet would say, that is ‘to be believed.’

The poem from which the title Sunblue originates is called “Light.” I’ve mentioned before how the sun is a central image in many of Margaret’s poems. Sunblue seems to refer to the color of shadow created by the sun; when the poet looks to the ‘sunblue,’ she looks both at herself cast in shadow and also at the sun who creates the shadow. Here is section II of “Light.”


II.

That picture, taken from the
wing window, shows a shadow.

High up, between
the last clouds and the airless
light/dark, any shadow is
– apart from facing sunlessness –
self, upon
self.

Nights have flowed;
tree shadows gather; the sundial
of a horizoning hill in Lethbridge measures the
long grassy afternoon.

Still, freed from swallowing downtown blocks of shadow,
I note self-shadow on
stone, cement, brick,
relieved; and look to the sunblue.

So, now.


(From Always Now, Vol. 2. p.66)