Moosewood Sandhills (Tim Lilburn)

‘Moosewood Sandhills’ can be thought of as a poetic counterpart to Lilburn’s seminal collection of essays, ‘Living In The World As If It Were Home’. It documents his retreat to the parched scrublands of Saskatchewan, Canada; a place where ‘the dead are believed to meander’. Here he ‘planted thin gardens, dug a root cellar, slept in the fields under summer stars – and looked’. The poems, by turns revelatory and ecstatic, revolve around simple acts of attention; of exchanging glances with animals; of seeing their traces in the bare hills. ‘Moosewood Sandhills’ is akin to a lost sacred text of the desert fathers; a remarkable collection of meditations from one of Canada’s finest poets. This new Xylem Books edition is published to coincide with the book’s 25th anniversary.