Optic Heart: A Biography of Margaret Avison, Volume 1: 1918-1977. By David A. Kent, The St. Thomas Poetry Series, 2026.
If you want to know more about the remarkable Christian who wrote what critics have called “some of the most humane, sweet and profound poetry of our time,” read David A. Kent’s Optic Heart: A Biography of Margaret Avison.
Margaret Avison twice won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Poetry: for Winter Sun, her first book of poetry published in 1960, and again for No Time in 1989. In 2003, her collection Concrete and Wild Carrot won the esteemed Griffin Poetry Prize. The Griffin judges praised her sublimity and humility.
This is not Mr. Kent’s first study of a distinguished Christian poet. He edited The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, the English Victorian poet. He is also the editor of the anthology Christian Poetry in Canada.
Ms. Avison is an often difficult and enigmatic poet who at age 45 experienced a religious conversion that afterwards informed all her life and poetry. As an English teacher and editor, and as a committed Christian himself, Mr. Kent is an ideal biographer of this strange and complex poet.
Margaret Avison (1918-2007) had a long life, and in Volume 1 Mr. Kent spends almost 400 pages (not including footnotes) documenting her first six decades. He draws extensively on Ms. Avison’s autobiography, I am Here and Not Not-There, which was published in 2007, two years after her death. But any autobiography is, by definition, highly subjective and can leave huge gaps.
Besides digging in numerous archives, and initially spending considerable time with Ms. Avison, Mr. Kent interviewed no less than 65 writers, Christian leaders, family members and friends who knew her well, including such literary luminaries as Northrop Frye, Morley Callghan, John Robert Colombo, Denise Levertov and James Reaney. He also interviewed Margaret Clarkson, Grace Irwin, David Jeffrey and Wilber Sutherland, among others, for insights into her spiritual journey.
Ms. Avison was a very private person, so in deference to her discomfort with biographical work, Mr. Kent agreed to publish his book after her death. “Had I known about Avison’s profound aversion to biography, her ‘wish to remain anonymous,’ I might never have begun this critical biography,” he writes.
Born in 1918 in Galt, Ont., Ms. Avison had a happy childhood with loving parents. Her sister Mary remembers four-year-old Margaret’s first rhyme: “Little birdie up in the birch / Sing to the people going to church.”
Her father was a prominent Presbyterian minister, first in Ontario, then in Regina and Calgary. Margaret always had fond memories of her early years in western Canada. But the family’s move back east to Toronto was not a happy time for 11-year-old Margaret. By age 15 she was hospitalized for three months with anorexia nervosa. This occurred after the sudden death of her favourite English teacher at Humberside Collegiate.
Gladys Story had given Ms. Avison what became a critical piece of advice: “For the next 10 years do not use the first person in any poem you write.” The advice stayed with her, and in later life she was generally impatient with “confessional poems, since they were often marked with ‘synthetic self-pity’ and ‘unearned anxiety.’”
One day, a youth pastor asked the “preacher’s kid,” who was now a teen, to stop teaching Sunday school because her teaching was upsetting someone. “For the rest of her life, her concern with safeguarding personal privacy was grounded in the public scrutiny she experienced in childhood and adolescence,” writes Mr. Kent.
At University of Toronto’s Victoria College, Ms. Avison became close friends with another shy but brilliant intellectual, Northrup Frye, who would go on to influence her creative life.
After graduation she led the life of a Bohemian artist, living in a rented room, eating sparingly and doing freelance editing or clerical work so she could devote her time to reading and writing poetry.
Ms. Avison was a self-effacing, modest woman who deplored pretention and celebrity culture. “Her sympathies instinctively reached out to the disposed and the marginalized,” Mr. Kent tells us. She may briefly have considered social work but “chose poetry as her life work.”
Mr. Kent chose the title of his biography Optic Heart from the opening lines of her poem “Snow,” which was published in 1960:
Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes.
The optic heart must venture: a jail-break,
And re-creation.
Although she had grown up in Methodist and United Church manses, as an adult Ms. Avison did not darken the door of a church for 25 years. But in 1960 “a singular experience” changed her life. While editing some manuscripts in Victoria College, she became aware of a woman standing silently across from her desk. When she looked up the woman said simply, “Do you know the joy of knowing the Lord Jesus?” Ms. Avison was exasperated and replied, “I know the theory, and as you can see, I am busy.”
Instead of being downcast, the stranger’s face “just shone” and she gave the poet the address of Knox Presbyterian Church on Spadina Avenue, saying, “Come and see if you like it,” then left.
After several months, Ms. Avison did attend Knox and found the people different from the exclusively academic group she had been working with for years. She met with the senior minister, Dr. William Fitch, and asked him, “I keep hearing about faith in there. You people have it. I don’t. What am I supposed to do?” When Dr. Fitch learned of her background, he encouraged her to “read and reread the Gospel of John – daily.”
At first Ms. Avison resisted the pull back to Christian commitment, but on the morning of Jan. 4, 1963, before setting off for work, she read, “You believe in God, believe also in Me.” (John 14:1) And while she did not have a vision, she sensed a Person present. She said, “I’ll believe, but oh, don’t take the poetry. It’s all I’ve got left.” Finally, she hurled her bible across the room and said, “Okay, take the poetry too!” Then she set off for work.
Mr. Kent relates how she soon noticed how “quickened” her senses were and how “creative ideas abounded.” She did not have to sacrifice her poetry as she had feared. A year later, she composed this stanza in “Prayer–(Answered with renewed prayer)”:
What only Christ makes real
Rests in astonishment
In one Uncommonweal:
(Love is heart-rent.)
She wrote in an essay in HIS Magazine in 1968 that the impulse to write and the impulse to “serve God” do not need to be in conflict. At the same time, Christian writers should avoid the temptation to “play it safe” and choose subjects within the “clearly defined” bounds of doctrine. Mr. Kent notes that “while Avison was a committed Christian, she distrusted didacticism.”
For short stretches she worked as a librarian and then a university lecturer but left both, sensing that such full-time work was interfering with her writing. She never married, but she was not without close friends and did receive some romantic proposals.
In mid-life she nurtured younger writers and argued that Canada Council Grants should go to them, not to established writers like herself. She was also a “scholar who worked among the outcasts.” After her conversion, she spent long hours first as a volunteer, then later on staff at Evangel Hall, a street mission outreach of Knox Church.
One supervisor observed: “Margaret loved and understood the characters at the mission. She identified with their poverty, mental illness and aloneness. For one of the mission’s windows Margaret wanted to write, ‘You don’t have to go it alone.’” She once said, “There are only two kinds of people after all. Jesus. And all the rest of us.”
In another essay, she wrote about what she wished she had known earlier about the Christian way of life, “that nobody is remote from God;” “that music, libraries, and winter mornings burning with cold beauty are the gifts God lavishes.”
Here are the oping stanzas of her 1966 poem “Dumbfounding”:
When you walked here,
took skin, muscle, hair,
eyes, larynx, we
withheld all honor: “His house is clay,
how can he tell us of his far country ?”
Your not familiar pace
in flesh, across the waves,
woke only our distrust.
Twice-torn we cried “A ghost”
and only on our planks counted you fast.
Dust wet with your spittle
cleared mortal trouble.
We called you a blasphemer,
a devil-tamer.
The evening you spoke of going away
we could not stay.
All legions massed. You had to wash, and rise,
alone, and face
out of the light, for us.
Mr. Kent is excellent at grasping Ms. Avison’s poetry and contextualizing her life. Every Canadian university English department would do well to purchase a copy of Optic Heart. So would poets and those who enjoy poetry, especially the works of John Donne and George Herbert. Mr. Kent hopes to publish Volume II in 2028.
Mr. Kent, together with his wife, Margo Swiss, began The St. Thomas Poetry Series at St. Thomas, Huron Street in 1988. It was launched with his anthology Christian Poetry in Canada. In 1996, the reading series included the publication of books by Christian poets. Optic Heart will be the 37th book in the series. It is a non-profit venture, and all proceeds from the sales of one book are used to publish the next. There will be a book launch for Optic Heart on April 25 at 2:30 p.m. at St. Thomas, 383 Huron St., Toronto.
