Anne Gibbons Wilkinson Biography

Canadian poet, born in Toronto, educated in London, Ontario, the USA, and France. A beautifully written memoir of her childhood, ‘Four Corners of My World’, appeared posthumously in the Tamarack Review, a journal of which she was a founding editor, in 1961 and was subsequently republished in her Collected Poems. She came to poetry fairly late in life and is best known for two collections, Counterpoint to Sleep (1951) and The Hangman Ties the Holly (1955). Her Collected Poems appeared, with a prefatory essay by A. J. M. Smith, in 1968. The subjects of her poetry include her background as a member of a distinguished Canadian family, philosophical speculation, and, especially in her last years (she died early from cancer), death. Her prose work Lion in the Way (1956) is an account of the early years of her family's settlement in Upper Canada, notable for the vivid portrait of her great-grandmother and as social history.