ISBN 978-1-9999718-7-8
68pp
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.