[1][2] He is the author of several critically acclaimed collections of poetry, including Kill-site, To the River, Moosewood Sandhills and his latest work Going Home.
Successful even in the early stages of his career, Lilburn's second work, Tourist To Ecstasy, was shortlisted for the Governor's General's Award but did not win.
In 2017 he received HOMER - The European Medal of Poetry and Art[9] During the writing of Orphic Politics in 2006, Lilburn's health began to deteriorate.
In Lilburn's poems, lying down seems to encourage kinds of patience and contact unlike those found through that favourite, more familiar activity of nature poets, walking.
Lilburn's writing discusses the strangeness of the inhabitants of the riverscape and contrasts it with his acute familiarity with his local surroundings: willow, geese, river ice, coyote and snowberry.
Here Lilburn returns once again to Saskatchewan: "I realized that at forty, although I had been probed by many psychologists, spent eight years in Jesuit formation, read many books, I had done nothing to educate myself to be someone who could live with facility, familiarity, where he was born."