Living in the World as If it Were Home

Written over a nine-year span, Living In The World As If It Were Home is a careful, exquisite look at the human desire to share 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 conditions of Paradise; it explores the world of prairies 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 nothing 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.