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 37^th 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.

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I didn’t intend to review this book. Knowing almost nothing about the encampments of unhoused people that are springing up in towns and cities across Ontario, I thought I should find someone else to write it, someone qualified.

But then some tents and tiny homes moved into the park beside the Synod Office, where I work, and I began to ask myself some questions. Who are these people? Where do they come from? Why are they sleeping outside? And most pressingly, how do they make it through the winter?

So I began to read Encampment, just to see if it would provide me with some answers, and I’m really glad I did because it gave me so much more.

The story revolves around the encampment at St. Stephen in-the-Fields church in Kensington Market in Toronto and the efforts of its priest, the Rev. Canon Maggie Helwig, and her colleagues to look after, defend and advocate for the people who called the place home. The encampment lasted from about 2022 to 2024, when the City finally tore most it down, encircled the ground with a tall fence and put concrete blocks inside it.

“I am writing this because I want you to understand my world, the world I live in, and the world I live alongside,” writes Canon Helwig at the beginning of the book. A little further on she writes, “This is one story, flawed and incomplete, of people who have been trying to look after each other in very hard times, and some of the ways in which we have been changed.”

Canon Helwig lives in and alongside worlds that most of us could scarcely imagine. Ministering to an encampment and its inhabitants is hard, grinding work. It is a world of non-stop need, of exhausting battles with bureaucracy, of endless loss, of disappearance and death, of angry neighbours and apathetic officials, of harassment and humiliation, of heartbreaking vulnerability.

Indeed, it would be almost impossible to read this book if it weren’t for the fact that Canon Helwig is a natural storyteller who effortlessly weaves the various threads of her worlds into a rich, compelling tapestry. She is a candid and surprisingly non-judgmental writer. She also has a wonderfully dry sense of humour with an eye for the comical and absurd – a precious asset for a book such as this.

And she’s entirely at home in the worlds she writes about. “I have never been much more than a tourist in the land of the well,” she writes. “And probably I should have been more patient, and I should have been more understanding. But the land of affliction is, one way and another, my home.”

Wisely, she doesn’t try to write a step-by-step account of the encampment at St. Stephen’s and its eventual and inevitable destruction – the media did a pretty good job of that. Rather, she tells the story of those strange and trying years through the stories of the people who lived there, stories that she was given either formally or through long relationships. “I have a profound responsibility to these stories, a responsibility to tell them, and to tell them as truly as I can,” she writes.

We learn about Chaz the Agent of Chaos, about Douglas and Robin and Isaac, about Jeff and his dog Taurus, about Pirate and the Artist. We learn about the Jane and John Does who come and go and the unnamed girl who died of an overdose beside the church. It’s not a pretty picture but it’s endlessly fascinating. These people keep going despite unbelievable odds against them. They are tenacious and fragile, difficult and loveable, hyper-vigilant and too trusting. They are creative and funny, exasperating and argumentative. They just want to live in peace like everyone else. Most of all, they want to belong somewhere.

As Canon Helwig writes, they’re pretty much the same as the rest of us, except we get to hide it all behind walls.

To her credit, Canon Helwig doesn’t demonize the folks on the other side of the great divide – the city staffers who suddenly show up and frighten everyone, the bylaw enforcement officers serving notice after notice, the jaded bureaucrats, the bogus neighbourhood improvement groups calling for change, the local councillor, the right-wing political candidate who shows up to make a speech, Mayor John Tory, the police and firefighters, the principal and parents of the local Montessori school. Even the Claw, the monstrous machine that the City uses to pluck up tents, tarps, plastic wraps, sleeping bags, boarding and anything else people use to shelter themselves in encampments.

If it wasn’t so tragic, the whole thing would be a farce. And it’s not going to end anytime soon, writes Canon Helwig. As the fight for resources intensifies and the social fabric continues to unravel, there will be more encampments, more unhoused people, more confrontations, more Claws.

But she’s not without hope. Interspersed throughout the story are passages of scripture, quotes from a book by Archbishop Rowan Williams and excerpts from her own sermons given during that time. Her faith is steadfast. Her strength and inspiration is Jesus. “We must love,” she writes. “We must love among the hate and the injustice, among the ruins, we must love those who do nothing to earn our love…”

There are two other aspects of this book that make it worth reading. One is that it provides a rare glimpse into an inner-city parish that is trying to operate in the most challenging of circumstances. The other is that it touches on one of the strangest times in Toronto’s history, from about 2014 to 2024, a decade that included searing heat, orange skies, woodsmoke, a serial killer in the Gay Village, social distancing, masks, COVID-19 and the commodification of housing. It is a vivid snapshot of our recent past, whether we like it or not.

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Warren was my great uncle, and I discovered his small, faded diary some years ago in the bottom of a portable wooden writing box that my father had passed on to me. The diary was long forgotten, lost really, as often happens to such fragile links to the past—letters and other memorabilia stored away in trunks and desks and attics for seeming safe keeping. These connections to the past are important and indeed valuable, and if I had not found Warren’s diary, I would never have been able to come to know, at least a little, both Warren and his father – my great-grandfather, the Rev. Canon Lawrence Skey, once upon a time the rector of St. Anne’s, a church he made quite famous as he oversaw the construction of the Byzantine Revival building in the early 1900s.

As I transcribed Warren’s diary and struggled to make sense of his often-illegible handwriting, military abbreviations, and names and places that meant nothing to me, I realized that there were stories that I could tell drawing on his day-by-day entries. There is the story of Warren himself, a gunner in the 48th Howitzer Battery of the 2nd Brigade of the Canadian Field Artillery. He was not quite 22 when he arrived in France and almost immediately found himself in “charge of guns” (there were six howitzers in his battery, all horse-drawn). Warren also soon found himself confronted with the reality of war: “Believe me, it’s damn hard to see those fellows dying & feel so powerless to stop it.” It was not only the men he saw wounded or dead, but also the horses.

Integral to an artillery brigade in World War I were the thousands and thousands of horses and mules, a reality not always covered in depth in books on the war yet expressed in an understated way by Warren, who always enjoyed being with the horses away from the guns at the wagon lines or taking them to the watering places. He knew firsthand, however, the inherent dangers and threat of death the equines with their drivers faced as they took ammunition to the gunpits near the front under cover of nighttime darkness. Warren was “packing ammunition to the guns” through November at Passchendaele, where his efforts to rescue both men and pack horses from that hell earned him the Military Cross. “Thank the Lord & am O.K.”, he wrote, then put his diary away for good.

The title of my book is Horses, Howitzers, and Hymns. I have explained very briefly why horses and howitzers, but what of the hymns? Church was important to Warren, and he was always disappointed when he realized that another Sunday had passed him by; there were no Sundays “when in action for there is too much work to do.” But on April 29 he wrote: “Oh! What a day! warm as June – a perfect Sunday – but no church – the bands playing the old familiar hymns made me long for old St. Anne’s again – I think that the only things that make me homesick are those old familiar hymns.” I wish I knew what they may have been.

Church services were but one of the many responsibilities of military chaplains who served in the war, whether in ambulances and hospitals or in the trenches and gunpits. They said prayers for the dying and wrote letters home to the families of the dead. Warren’s father had to do this too when he was in France as a chaplain through the last year of the war. In his letter, Chaplain Skey would explain that he also had a son at the front and so understood a parent’s sorrow. It was perhaps a stroke of luck that he was nearby when one of his own parishioners died, so he conducted the funeral service himself in the Sucrerie Cemetery.

Warren and his father had hoped to spend time together fishing when on leave, but it was month after month of battles—Arras, Amiens, Cambrai. The Rev. Skey was in London when the armistice was declared and back at St. Anne’s in December 1918; Warren returned six months later. Somewhere between 700 and 800 parishioners had originally enlisted, and the church was fierce in its support of the war, so understandably there were celebrations in the parish hall; but not everyone came home. On Sunday, Nov. 14, 1920, two solemn services were held for the unveiling of the memorial window and bronze tablet on the north wall of the church. The Rev. Skey, now a canon, officiated at the morning service, and his friend Canon F.G. Scott, the almost legendary military chaplain, at the evening service. The names of all 84 men engraved on the tablet were read aloud one by one, the congregation standing, the music and hymns specially chosen. Most of these men are buried or commemorated on monuments overseas, but a few rest in Toronto Prospect Cemetery, never having recovered from their wounds, among them Warren’s friend Henry Chedzey.

In writing Warren’s story, I was very conscious that I never knew him or my great-grandparents. I was also conscious that I had read something that Warren most likely never thought would become the essence of a book. I hope, as I wrote in the epilogue, that I have not stepped too intrusively into their lives, nor those of others within. It has been an honour to know them all.

Horses, Howitzers, and Hymns: The Story of Lieut. Skey, MC, and His Father in the Great War, is available from major booksellers.

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Kent, David A., and Kennedy, Patricia A. (eds.) Household of God: A Parish History of St. Thomas’s Church, Toronto. Volume Two: 1984-2024. St. Thomas’s Church, 2024. ISBN 9781928095118. 450pp.

“For years, the atmospheric photograph of the Palm Sunday procession that accompanied John Bentley Mays’s article in The Globe and Mail has adorned a wall in my home. It captures the drama of the procession on that day, in which Willem Hart was thurifer, Neil Hoult and Caleb Reynolds were acolytes, and my daughter Sarah was boat girl. From time to time, folks have queried the context of the photo, wondering what kind of play Sarah was in and what kind of smoke the producer used. ‘The drama of salvation,’ I would always explain, ‘and the sweet smell of home.’”

These reminiscences of the Rev. Canon Susan Haig, a sometime parishioner of St. Thomas, Huron Street, published in the second volume of this history (p. 345), expresses perfectly the character of the parish nicknamed “Smoky Tom’s.” As a newcomer to the parish at the beginning of 2025, I was delighted to discover that I could read an up-to-date history to get to know the people among whom – and the place and practices within which – I am now worshipping. The drama of the liturgy and the smell of the incense I had already encountered in the Epiphany celebrations that were my first experiences of the church as a parishioner. The drama of parish life remains to be discovered, and the nearly 1,000 pages of this history have proven to be a most helpful introduction.

The two volumes are similarly structured, starting with accounts of the incumbent priests, the church building and its furnishings and equipment, the liturgy and music, guilds and groups, education and outreach, and concluding with essays, tributes and myriad reminiscences. The essays included are marvelously thought-provoking, particularly on the liturgy and music, the art and architecture, and the demographics of the parish. The editors, David Kent and Patricia Kennedy for both volumes and with Hugh Anson-Cartwright for the first, must be commended for the evident care and competence with which they brought together the work of so many people. Both volumes are handsomely designed, generously illustrated (in both colour and black and white), and soundly printed and bound as hardcover books.

I enthusiastically recommend this work as a whole to church historians both professional and amateur (because this history is both a rich resource for research and an admirable exemplar for emulation), to fellow Anglicans around the world (because the story of St. Thomas’s is inspiring and encouraging in its demonstration of the providence of God affording the faithfulness of particular people in a particular place following particular—in this case, Prayer Book Catholic—practices), and to my present and future fellow parishioners of St. Thomas’s (because we cannot forge our future without understanding our past). In taking up this reading you will be following the example of the Rev. Nathan Humphrey, who begins his introduction to the second volume by mentioning that “one of the first things I did after accepting the call to be the eighth rector of St. Thomas’s … was to go online and buy a used copy of [the first volume of] Household of God.”

Any reading of this history would be well-accompanied by visits to the church building and participation in at least a high mass, an evensong service, and a feast that includes a procession. As this history describes and explains, St. Thomas’s is a parish centered on incarnational reality, to such an extent that the relationships between the aesthetic reality of the building and its furnishings, the dramatic reality of the liturgical practices performed in that building, and the personal reality of priests and laity all are inextricably woven together, ultimately because of their common central focus on the reality of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This is a church that engages worshippers’ every sense, including taste in the eucharist, smell in the incense, sight in the furnishings and vestments, touch in the pews and kneelers, and certainly not least, hearing in the marvelous music. The evolution of “the St. Thomas’s sound” is described and explained across the two volumes and situated within the evolution of the liturgical tradition of the parish.

The ways in which the Eden Smith building both provides a home to the people and practices of the parish and is itself expressive of the spiritual reality of the parish’s faith shows forth on very nearly every page of the two volumes. The baptistry – described by the art critic John Bentley Mays as “perhaps the most beautiful small room in Toronto” in his 1995 Globe article – allows for the making of poignant connections between the Christian sacraments of initiation, family love, and the horrors of war. The triptych above the altar in the Lady Chapel memorializes the formative influences of Father Roper, who put the parish on the liturgical path along which we continue to travel, and Mother Hannah Coome, the founder of the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine. The carved wooden figures in the reredos behind the high altar illustrate the spiritual ecosystem of the parish, with the figure of St. Thomas (as a carpenter) at the centre surrounded, for example, by St. James (representing the diocesan cathedral and mother church of the parish), St. Augustine of Canterbury (representing the worldwide Anglican communion), St. Cyprian (representing a parish birthed from St. Thomas’s), and St. John (representing the historical relationship of St. Thomas’s with both the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine and the Society of St. John the Evangelist).

The stories of the priests and people of the parish help the reader understand why the Rev. Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan in her reminiscences, included in the first volume, could call St. Thomas’s “a prototype of a parish,” and why the Rev. Canon David Harrison in his reminiscences, included in the second volume, can observe that “St. Thomas’s asks much of its people.” The colour illustrations and written descriptions in both volumes provide a glimpse of the incarnational materiality of the faith practices of this community as expressed in our incense, silver, vestments, altar cloths, and in the faithful service of our Acolytes Guild and Altar Guild.

The vernacular domestic coziness and richly symbolic furnishings of the present building of St. Thomas’s (opened in 1893) represent for me the way in which Christians dwell in the world. I was surprised to learn from this history that the first, wooden building of the parish represents the way in which Christians journey in the world. That building was cut in two, mounted on rollers, and drawn by horses from Bathurst Street to Sussex Avenue in Toronto in 1882, which resulted in amused church folk calling it “the peripatetic church.” The journey was re-enacted in a liturgical procession on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels in 1974, the centenary of the founding of the parish.

The 1893 brick Arts & Crafts church designed by parishioner Eden Smith to replace the original wooden church was itself intended to be replaced in phases over time by a grander stone structure, but the “temporary” church has endured for 130 years.

The wooden “peripatetic church” of 1882 and the brick “temporary church” of 1893 that has turned out to be the permanent (yet ever-changing) home for this community together represent the creative tension inherent in the Christian life. This creative tension is encapsulated in the traditional Benedictine vows of stability, obedience, and conversion of life that the Prayer Book tradition of Anglicanism has claimed as its birthright and charism. In this regard, St. Thomas’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow, is indeed the “prototype of a parish.”

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