Tim Lilburn

I began writing the poems in Kill-site in 1997. I knew that I wanted the book to be somehow different from my previous book, To the River; I suspected that it might turn out to be, but didn’t know how this difference would show itself. It took me some time to become comfortable with the direction the Kill-site poems took.

What to say about the book? Here’s one possibility: It’s a long poem about prayer (this, of course, could be said of many books). Or: It’s a long poem about yet another failed expedition to track the hidden natures of things. It has seemed to me for a while that the European mind hasn’t properly settled in western North America, isn’t autochthonic here. So the book is about looking around, and where the long look could take you.