About the Book
With Numinous Seditions, celebrated poet and essayist Tim Lilburn investigates inner dispositions that might help us bear the new sorrows of the climate crisis. The book draws from the West’s almost forgotten contemplative tradition in its Platonic, Islamic, Christian, and Zoharic forms. It also explores ideas from modern philosophers Jan Zwicky, Gillian Rose, Dorothy Day, and Simone Weil, and from contemporary poets Don Domanski, Philip Kevin Paul, Anne Szumigalski, and Roberto Harrison. Lilburn suggests that listening, noticing, reading, and stretching our imaginations are all part of an interior stance that can assist with the difficult tasks of forming deep relationships with the land, with Indigenous peoples, and with pedagogy itself. Numinous Seditions is for scholars and readers interested in poetry, environmental philosophy, and in the possibility of a contemplative politics.
Table of Contents:
Preface New Sadness Interiority and Climate Change Contemplative Practices, Contemplative Pedagogies Hoping for Something to Appear | The Poetry of Don Domanski Poetry’s Practice of Philosophy | Anne Szumigalski Reading William Chittick Reading Ibn ‘Arabi Happy Incompetencies, the Self’s Other Routes Poverty and the Doom of Acedia Ontological Loneliness and the Balm of Metaphor Two Readings on Snow, Two Readings on Sorrow In the Time of Extreme Heat, In the Time of the Discovery of Unmarked Graves at the Site of Residential Schools Numinous Seditions Dream Coda Glossary Reading Index
About the Author :
Tim Lilburn has published twelve books of poetry, including Kill-site, Assiniboia, The Names, and Harmonia Mundi. His poetry has received the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award. Lilburn has produced three previous books of essays, each concerned with poetics, eros, philosophy and politics, especially environmentalism: Living in the World as if It Were Home (Saskatchewan Non-Fiction Book of the Year), Going Home, and The Larger Conversation. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2014. He lives in Victoria, BC, on the homelands of the W̱SÁNEĆ, Songhees, and Esquimalt Nations.
Review :
"Numinous Seditions proposes to expand the human imagination with a call to renewed vision. It invites the reader into active, thoughtful engagement with arguably the most crucial question of our time: what can I make of myself, in the world we have made for ourselves?" H. L. Hix, University of Wyoming
"Among the book’s ample gifts are its refusal of confected hope and its hosting of a larger conversation. Here Ibn ‘Arabī brushes foreheads with Anne Szumigalski, Andrew Ahenakew’s polar bear shares the sky with the angel of pseudo-Dionysius. In contemplating shards of ancient wisdom, Lilburn seeks the grace needed to grieve the conflagration of the world." Warren Heiti, author of Attending: An Ethical Art
“The lucent essays gathered in Tim Liburn’s new book offer what they adumbrate: a ‘refugium for attentiveness,’ opening lines of earthbound thought, enriching our lexicon, and retrieving forgotten practices in order to cultivate a contemplative, compassionate, and creative modus vivendi in the midst of the unspeakable sorrow of ecological unravelling, climatic disruption, and the continuing legacies of imperialist violence. Amongst them is a meditation on lectio divina that might be taken as a guide for reading these essays themselves, many of them tending towards the fragmentary, punctuated with pauses, and all of them replete with invitations to see, feel, and imagine otherwise.” Kate Rigby, author of Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction
"[Tim Lilburn] creates an argument for beingness that has the possibility of healing humankind’s current dissociation from intuition, knowledge, spirit, self, and nature... He becomes our guide, searching for the new, grounding, authentic habitude." Steven Ross Smith, British Columbia Review, June 25, 2024 [Full review at https://thebcreview.ca/2024/06/25/2214-smith-lilburn/]
