The Names

The Names is personal and familial archeology, an extemporal dig giving spectres back to their bodies. With its lines sped up and dazzingly associative, Tim Lilburn’s cocktail of obsessions -- confession, ontology, mystical theology, humour and extreme, fleet, apt weirdness -- marches through on full display. He pulls in an even wilder cast of characters than his previous collections managed: Jan Ruusbroec and Marguerite Porete brush past aunts, uncles, and unidentified creatures steering the boats of language past fog-draped trees. In Lilburn’s latest collection, we are immersed in a realism of remarkable proportions, as though haunted memory comprised both texture and text, and combined formed the elemental fibres of a perilous present.