Abstract

Written over a nine-year span, Living In The World As If It Were Home is a careful, exquisite look at the human desire t oshare a home with long grass, rivers, and stones, by poet Tim Lilburn. Lilburn's collection of essays plots the work required to roughly re-establish the condistions of Paradise; it explores the world of priries rivers, aspen-covered sandhills, deer country, big lakes taking on their first ice in late October, the moon rising over chokecherry thickets, and asks: how to be here?There's nother glib about the answer Lilburn offers as he says in one of his poems: ""The way back will be hard, ghost road through the rooms of sorrow/moon of contemplation on our backs." Though hard, however, the way is readily available: plain delight, he believes, knows the way. But the project to live in the world as though it were home requires the recovery of the full resources of human desire. The muscle of eros needs to be made strong. To do this, Lilburn turns to those almost forgotten masters of desire, the mystics of the negative way, psuedo-Dionysius, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing and John Scotus Eriugena.This is a remarkable collection, a ""classic" as Dennis Lee says in his foreword, by a writer with passion and insight, in hopeless love with the unsayable world, the place wich ""ignites awe" yet is completely vulnerable to human ingenuid104.