Vanity Shades

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

Cleverly disguised in her day job as a registered nurse, Edmonton author
Mary Howes is really a poet, film columnist, performance artist, and
freelance journalist. Her film writing has earned a nomination for an
Alberta Motion Picture Industry Award. Vanity Shades is a fine
collection of poems that will not disappoint fans of her earlier works
(Lying in Bed and QHS) and will richly reward those just making
Howes’s acquaintance.

These poems are consistently wry—with humor holding terror in a fine
balance—and consistently moving. With fierce discipline and real
grace, the author explores the constellation of love, sickness, and
death; and shows us how, in or out of hospital (the difference is
largely nominal), “Vanity Shades us from / what we really want to
see.” In her view, we are all sufferers from “congenital heart
disease,” and—even as the shadows drag us down—we cling to the
pathetic heap of our secrets (“just because I have no clothes on /
doesn’t mean I’m naked”).

Despite her admonition to “beware the place you leave your heart,”
Howes has clearly not followed her own advice. The result is a
collection of rare grace and self control, one that takes the reader
into those dark places where, if anywhere, pain becomes poetry.