Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

We Need To See This
Betsy Struthers
Running Out of Time. Wolsak and Wynn $10.00
Roberta Rees
Eyes Like Pigeons. Brick $10.95
Judith Fitzgerald
Habit of Blues. Mercury $11.95
Su Croll
Worlda Mirth. Kalamalka New Writers Series n.p.
Reviewed by Nancy Holmes
Betsy Struther is one of many Canadian
women writers writing of the formerly
unspeakable in women's lives. Although
Struthers describes terrible incidents—men
exposing themselves, the abuse of little
girls—her preoccupation seems to be the
consensual act of sex, the feelings of desire
and the inadequacy of the act to comfort us
(the central theme of infertility hints at
dead-end). At times, she can write well
about women's sexuality. With the lines
"Our fingers fit, bones/ in the space
between bones," she gives us a feeling of
that space of suspended skin between the
bones. However, Struthers only irregularly
accomplishes this tactile immediacy, for
later in this same poem, "Sounding Line,"
one of her weaknesses as a writer is
revealed: her tendency to rely on language
that verges on cliché. The fine lines about
fingers are followed by an image of a "pulse
surging with the tide." Like many other
examples in the book—"The urgent pulse
of flesh," for instance, in another poem—
this is just bad writing. Her diction is often
harlequin romance. In "Rendezvous," she
writes "your breath with my pulse/accelerates,
soars." In a poem called "Hors
d'Oeuvres," Struthers celebrates women's
bodies with weary "feminist poet" Great
Mother Sea imagery: brine and pearls and
"overwhelming tide." Her persona's memory
of the "the first time .../ I felt the knob
of my cervix" is more laughable than
empowering or daring. With a few exuberant
exceptions ("Under my Skin" is a funny
poem about fucking in poison ivy),
Struthers often doesn't have enough irony
or panache, perhaps because she feels some
self-consciousness about describing sexual
experience. Discomfort is hinted at in a few
memorable lines describing a streetlight:
How we hated to see it planted
on the edge of our garden,
a dead tree, its one eye bold
on our bedroom window.
When Struthers moves away from the
"female" experience and writes a prose
poem like "the Sentence" or part 1 of
"Giving Up," she seems less conscious of
being observed. In the last poems in the
book, elegies to her father, details move us
and each moment is acutely observed.
Roberta Rees, a Calgary writer, won both
the Alberta Poetry Award and Gerald
Lampert first Poetry Book award. Rees's
book has many of the failings of its poststructural
obsessions. The poetry is syntactically
fragmented and splintered, with
many deconstructive twitches. The sentence
fragment, repetition, the self-conscious use
of brackets are becoming dull conventions
in Canadian poetry. Why, for instance, does
a writer want to begin a line with a comma?
Or draw attention to the language in the
following uninteresting way:
no m before mother
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
other so br and r
brother with an s
Or make silly statements like "carillon
sounds like carrion," or make lists of
rhymes like "thigh sigh thai / nipple ripple
cripple." (I'm reminded of the song from
Sesame Street: One of these things is not
like the other—ripple?) All of this seems
more like a sophomoric game than real
attention to language. This is too bad
because Rees is grappling with "herstories"
of abuse, childbirth, rape, disease, alcoholism,
and immigration, and she is capa-
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