Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change

Tim Lilburn

Feb 2024 · University of Alberta

About this ebook

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.

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.